Sei Shōnagon's Lists

On a thousand-year-old notebook of lists, and why its form — not its content — is the thing worth borrowing.

Around the year 1000, a woman serving at the imperial court in the old capital kept a private notebook. She filled it, over years, with observations, scenes, complaints, and — the part she is remembered for — lists. Lists of things that delight, things that annoy, things that are awkward, things that have lost their power, things that ought to be one way and are stubbornly another.

The book is the “Makura no Sōshi,” usually given in English as “The Pillow Book.” Its author is known to us as Sei Shōnagon, which is a court title rather than a name; her actual name is lost. The notebook outlived the court it described, the language it was written in has changed beyond easy reading, and a thousand years later it is still, against all odds, one of the most alive books I own.

I have written, in an earlier letter, a small list of my own in her manner, and I do not want to repeat that here. Tonight I want to do the other thing — to look at the form itself, and at the woman who used it, and to make a case that the list, as Shōnagon practiced it, is a more serious instrument than its charm lets on.

The export version, and what it misses

The export version of the Pillow Book is that it is delightful. Charming. A sort of Heian-era social-media feed, full of the author’s strong opinions about what is elegant and what is vulgar. The lists get quoted the way one quotes a witty acquaintance: “Things that make the heart beat faster. Things that should be large. Things that give an unclean feeling.” We smile. We move on.

This is not wrong. Shōnagon is delightful, and she is opinionated, and parts of the book really do read like the world’s first and best feed of a sharp person noticing things.

But to leave it there is to miss what the form is actually doing. Underneath the charm, the list is a discipline — a way of holding attention on the world that refuses, on principle, to do the thing our minds most want to do with what they notice, which is to flatten it into a judgment and be done.

Why the list and not the essay

Consider what a list is, structurally, and what it withholds.

An essay — the form I am using right now — has to argue. It states a thing, supports it, concludes. By the end it has told you what to think. This is useful, and it is also, in a quiet way, a kind of closing of the hand. The essay finishes the noticing for you.

A list refuses to finish. Shōnagon writes the heading — “Things that make the heart beat faster” — and then she sets down, in order, sparrows feeding their young, passing a place where babies are at play, sleeping in a room where fine incense has been burned. And then she stops. She does not tell you what these have in common. She does not draw the conclusion. She trusts that you, reading, will feel the through-line yourself — and you do, and the feeling is stronger for not having been named.

The list holds several things side by side, lets them stay unlike, and declines to reduce them to a point. That declining is the whole technique. It is a way of keeping attention open instead of letting it snap shut on the first available judgment.

This is harder than it sounds, and you discover how hard the moment you try to keep a list of your own.

Where it gets difficult

Try writing “Things that should be small,” in her spirit, and you will feel the pull immediately.

The pull is toward explaining. You write down one item, and your hand wants to add why it belongs, what it proves, how it connects to the others. The mind hates an unexplained collection. It wants a thesis. It wants the list to become an argument so it can stop holding the items separately and start holding the single point.

Shōnagon’s discipline is to refuse that pull. The items stay. They are not premises building toward a conclusion. They are things, set down, kept in view. The refusal to conclude is not laziness — it is the most demanding part. It asks you to keep looking at a thing after you have understood it well enough to file it, which is the exact moment most of us stop looking.

There is a second difficulty, which is the headings. The obvious headings are judgments: good things, bad things, things I like. Shōnagon’s best headings are not judgments at all. “Things that lose by being painted.” “Things that gain by being heard at night.” “Things that are near though distant.” “Things that are distant though near.” These are not verdicts. They are categories of attention — ways of cutting the world that you would never have noticed were available until she named them, and that, once named, you cannot stop seeing through.

That is the gift of the form. A good heading is a new lens. It sends you back into the ordinary world looking for things that fit it, and the looking is the practice.

What I have learned from keeping one

I keep a few of these headings open, the way one might keep several jars on a shelf, and add to them over weeks when something fits.

The one I have kept longest is “Things that lose by being hurried.” Into it have gone, over a year: the first cup of tea in the morning. A letter to someone I have not seen in a while. The walk from the station when the air has just turned to autumn. Reading a poem. Cutting vegetables when I am not yet hungry. Putting a child to bed, on the rare evenings I am asked to.

I did not decide in advance what the heading meant. The heading taught me what it meant by what it collected. And now I cannot do any of those things in a hurry without a small interior note that says: this one. This is one of those. The list reached back out of the notebook and changed how I move through an ordinary day.

That is the thing the charming-trivia reading of Shōnagon cannot account for. The lists are not a record of a delightful sensibility. They are an instrument that produces one — in her, a thousand years ago, and in you, now, if you are willing to keep the headings open and resist, every time, the urge to conclude.

If you try it

Choose one heading that is not a judgment. Not “good things.” Something more like “things that are better the second time,” or “things that should be quiet,” or “things I would miss before I noticed they were gone.” Then leave it open for a season, and add to it only when something genuinely fits, and never explain the items, even to yourself.

At the end of the season, read the list. It will tell you something you did not set out to say. Shōnagon’s did, to her, which is presumably why she kept going for years.

This is the first of a few letters I want to write about her. She is the least solemn of the writers I keep company with, and, I have slowly come to think, one of the most exact.

If you keep a heading of your own through the summer, tell me what it turned out to collect. I will not be able to guess, and that is the best argument for the form I know.

— Tōan

“Tokyo, Sunday, the quiet part of the afternoon.”