THE NOTES APP

THE IOS NOTES APP DEBUTED with the first iPhone in 2007. Back then, the app’s default font looked vaguely like handwriting, and had a yellow background with horizontal lines between each row of text, an attempt to call to mind the yellow legal pads of yore. Even now, the Notes app has a slightly textured background that mimics paper, an example of what’s called skeuomorphic design, where a derivative object—say, an app—retains now-obsolete elements of the original object’s design. Casino slot machines, for instance, no longer need a pullable arm, but most still have one. Many mobile device apps use skeuomorphic design—our calculator apps are calculator-shaped; our digital watches have minute and hour hands, and so on. Perhaps all of this is done in the hopes that we won’t notice just how quickly everything is changing.

For most of my life, I took notes in the margins of whatever book I happened to be reading. I’ve never been the kind of person to carry a notebook. I want to be a person who journals, who sits on park benches and has wonderful thoughts that must be immediately captured. But I usually found that my thoughts could wait, and if for some reason I needed to scribble something down, I always had a book with me, and a pen in my pocket.

There is a grocery list in my copy of Song of Solomon, and directions to my great-aunt’s house in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. On page 241 of All the King’s Men, I wrote at the bottom of the page, “It rains for two days straight,” an idea I had for the plot of my first novel, Looking for Alaska. There are many other references to my stories in books I was reading. Sometimes it’s only a few words: FERAL HOG HUNT, scrawled in the margins of Our Southern Highlanders, became part of the climactic scene in my book An Abundance of Katherines.

Usually, though, my marginalia just baffles me. On page 84 of my copy of Jane Eyre, why did I write, “You have never been so lonely”? Was I even the you of that sentence? The note depends on a context I now lack. When I think back to reading Jane Eyre for the first time in college, I don’t remember being lonely or whatever else was happening in my daily life. I mostly remember Jane herself, how Rochester called her “my sympathy,” how Jane said the way to avoid hell was “to keep in good health and not die.”

I first got an iPhone in 2008, but I was slow to abandon my book-margin note-taking. I didn’t write in the Notes app until 2010. But not long after, I found that I was often leaving home without a pen in my pocket, and eventually I’d often leave home without a physical book in my hand. The problem of having neither pen nor paper was both caused and solved by the iPhone.*