For some years now, I have kept a commonplace book.
A commonplace book, of the sort kept by Francis Bacon and John Milton; Thomas Hardy and Henry David Thoreau, is a sort of low-tech aggregator of striking passages, apercus or insights, kept for the purpose of referring to them again.
Scholars have dated the commonplace book in Europe to the early middle ages, though some trace the practice to ancient Greece. The books were certainly kept by boys during the Tudor Age in England as well as in colonial New England, when books were hard to come by and pupils dutifully copied verses or excerpts of prose that appealed to them.
I began my common book in high school when I had become fed up with my dreary journal-keeping and its humiliating revelations, hoping that there must be a way to chart my emotional progress in less incriminating fashion.
So I began by jotting down a phrase from a poem or line from a song (“Pippin,” I’m embarrassed to say, was a favorite) into a palm-sized, lined notebook. I was not as dutiful a recorder as I should have been and seemed only to have logged phrases or stanzas intended to bolster my feeble self-concept, pledge myself to some grand ambition, or arm myself with some wise-yet-pithy riposte. Oh, yes, and there were the usual overwrought oaths to eternal friendship, in my case intended for a former girlfriend I’ve scarcely seen in 25 years.
If ever I thought that switching from a journal to a commonplace book would immunize me from certain embarrassment in adulthood, I was wrong. One can be just as shamed by the meaningful passages of youth written by someone else as those written by oneself. What possessed me, for instance, to inscribe “Evita’s Lament” in these pages? Or the poetry of that well-known bard, Judy Garland? Or long, circuitous passages by Kahil Gibran, T.E. Lawrence, Maya Angelo or Richard (shoot me now) Bach.
And while I have nothing against Kenneth Grahame’s “The Wind in the Willows,” what on earth could a 17-year-old have intended, writing “I’ve discovered the real thing…and can only regret the wasted years that lie behind…, squandered in trivialities.”
Such regret, and not yet 20.
What’s stunning about these books is what changes in them and what remains the same, yet more nuanced. If all we had at the end of our lives was a collection of sayings that were important to us, what would a stranger be able to discern of us? I for instance, was struck by the prevalence of so many Biblical quotes, and quotes from Shakespeare in so many of my early volumes. In later commonplace books, those quotes have become more tailored to my emerging understanding of faith and literature.
So while in my early 20s, I might have copied Saint Ambrose’s instruction “No duty is more urgent than that of returning thanks,” which I probably cribbed off of some religious store greeting card, in my 40s, I was reproducing Saint Augustine’s “Doubt is but another element of faith,” and Flannery O’Connor’s astute remark, “I hope that to be of two minds about something is not to be neutral.”
Temperance seems to have replaced self-righteousness, which is either conceding to the indignities of age, or something close to spiritual growth. In high school, I wrote “To achieve all that is possible me must attempt the impossible; to be as much as we can be, we must dream of being more,” which seems to have been the motto of some ruthless go-getter I scarcely remember. Today, the mottos I crib are more like these from Epictetus: “The surest sign of the higher life is serenity. Moral progress results in freedom from inner turmoil;” and “attach yourself to what is spiritually superior, regardless of what other people think or do.” And my favorite, from Hamlet to his mother: "Assume a virtue if you have it not!"
Is that progress or regression? I’m not sure. But a commonplace book has shown me, as it might you, that the trajectories of our lives are not as horizontal as we might imagine.
A commonplace book, of the sort kept by Francis Bacon and John Milton; Thomas Hardy and Henry David Thoreau, is a sort of low-tech aggregator of striking passages, apercus or insights, kept for the purpose of referring to them again.
Scholars have dated the commonplace book in Europe to the early middle ages, though some trace the practice to ancient Greece. The books were certainly kept by boys during the Tudor Age in England as well as in colonial New England, when books were hard to come by and pupils dutifully copied verses or excerpts of prose that appealed to them.
I began my common book in high school when I had become fed up with my dreary journal-keeping and its humiliating revelations, hoping that there must be a way to chart my emotional progress in less incriminating fashion.
So I began by jotting down a phrase from a poem or line from a song (“Pippin,” I’m embarrassed to say, was a favorite) into a palm-sized, lined notebook. I was not as dutiful a recorder as I should have been and seemed only to have logged phrases or stanzas intended to bolster my feeble self-concept, pledge myself to some grand ambition, or arm myself with some wise-yet-pithy riposte. Oh, yes, and there were the usual overwrought oaths to eternal friendship, in my case intended for a former girlfriend I’ve scarcely seen in 25 years.
If ever I thought that switching from a journal to a commonplace book would immunize me from certain embarrassment in adulthood, I was wrong. One can be just as shamed by the meaningful passages of youth written by someone else as those written by oneself. What possessed me, for instance, to inscribe “Evita’s Lament” in these pages? Or the poetry of that well-known bard, Judy Garland? Or long, circuitous passages by Kahil Gibran, T.E. Lawrence, Maya Angelo or Richard (shoot me now) Bach.
And while I have nothing against Kenneth Grahame’s “The Wind in the Willows,” what on earth could a 17-year-old have intended, writing “I’ve discovered the real thing…and can only regret the wasted years that lie behind…, squandered in trivialities.”
Such regret, and not yet 20.
What’s stunning about these books is what changes in them and what remains the same, yet more nuanced. If all we had at the end of our lives was a collection of sayings that were important to us, what would a stranger be able to discern of us? I for instance, was struck by the prevalence of so many Biblical quotes, and quotes from Shakespeare in so many of my early volumes. In later commonplace books, those quotes have become more tailored to my emerging understanding of faith and literature.
So while in my early 20s, I might have copied Saint Ambrose’s instruction “No duty is more urgent than that of returning thanks,” which I probably cribbed off of some religious store greeting card, in my 40s, I was reproducing Saint Augustine’s “Doubt is but another element of faith,” and Flannery O’Connor’s astute remark, “I hope that to be of two minds about something is not to be neutral.”
Temperance seems to have replaced self-righteousness, which is either conceding to the indignities of age, or something close to spiritual growth. In high school, I wrote “To achieve all that is possible me must attempt the impossible; to be as much as we can be, we must dream of being more,” which seems to have been the motto of some ruthless go-getter I scarcely remember. Today, the mottos I crib are more like these from Epictetus: “The surest sign of the higher life is serenity. Moral progress results in freedom from inner turmoil;” and “attach yourself to what is spiritually superior, regardless of what other people think or do.” And my favorite, from Hamlet to his mother: "Assume a virtue if you have it not!"
Is that progress or regression? I’m not sure. But a commonplace book has shown me, as it might you, that the trajectories of our lives are not as horizontal as we might imagine.
Sometimes they remind us os shards of ourselves best forgotten. Other times, they strike a central nerve. More often than not, they reveal some parenthetical enthusiasm that is closer to self-disclosure than we realized.
But mostly, I think, they reassure us that other souls have passed this way before, with their anxieties and their self-scolding, their epiphanies and their anguish. There is some comfort in aligning ourselves to the struggles of the human race that came before us and will, undoubtedly, outlive us.
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