On Keeping a Commonplace Book

For most of my adult life I kept notebooks without knowing what they were for. They filled with lists, overheard sentences, sketches of rooms, and quotations copied out in the dark. I called them journals, though they were not chronological, and diaries, though they rarely mentioned me.

Then I learned the old word for it: a commonplace book. A book of commonplaces. Not a record of what happened, but a record of what was worth keeping.

The oldest form of note-taking

Commonplace books were once an ordinary part of an educated life. Readers copied passages into bound volumes under headings — friendship, ambition, the weather — so that the best of what they read could be found again, recombined, and used. Locke wrote a treatise on the right way to index one. Renaissance schoolchildren were taught to keep them. They were not a hobby. They were a technology for thinking.

What strikes me now is how unprivate they were. A commonplace book was not a confession. It was a workshop. The point was not to express the self but to furnish it. You gathered sentences the way a carpenter gathers timber, because you intended to build something with them.

Collecting against forgetting

I have a memory that works by association rather than by retrieval. I can remember a sentence for years if I remember the room in which I read it, but I cannot always find the sentence when I want it. The commonplace book solves this by not trusting memory at all. It says: write it down, and write down where it came from, and let the paper carry what the mind cannot.

There is a small pleasure in this that I did not expect. When I copy a passage by hand, I read it differently. I notice its joints. I feel where the sentence resists. A quotation typed into a file remains a quotation; a quotation copied into a notebook becomes a little like something I have thought.

The act of copying is a way of asking a sentence to stay for a while.

Headings, not categories

The conventional advice is to organise by theme. I have found that themes are too clean for the way a mind actually works. My headings are closer to moods: things to remember at fifty, the problem of the chair, sentences with weather in them. They are idiosyncratic, and they are useful precisely because they are idiosyncratic. A heading you would never find in a library is a heading you might actually use.

The other rule I keep is to leave room. A commonplace book without blank pages is a museum of finished thoughts. The blanks are where the argument with the passage happens. A margin is a place to disagree.

A use for the collected

I do not keep the book in order to write essays, though essays come out of it. I keep it because it is a way of paying attention to what I read. The book is a record of my debts. Every entry says: this sentence did something to me, and I want to know what.

There is a page near the back where I have copied, without comment, a single line from a letter by Keats: The excellence of every art is its intensity. I do not fully know why it is there. I only know that when I read it, I sat up a little straighter. That is enough. The book is not an answer. It is a place to keep the questions that have been well asked.