Every now and then the universe seems to beat me over the head with something until I pay attention.

Years ago, I encountered almost daily references to the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam for an entire month before I finally picked up a copy — at which point the references abruptly stopped.

A while later I found myself in the same boat with Antonin Gramsci, until I holed myself up in a library and devoured his Notebooks. Nothing like immersing oneself in the thought of an imprisoned Italian Marxist to add flavor to a week spent visiting your girlfriend at college. But it worked: Gramsci stopped haunting me.

Now the same thing seems to be happening with Moleskine. I can only hope that buying and using one of these very, very nice notebooks will have some effect.