On Keeping a Commonplace Book
A commonplace book is not a journal. It is a workshop for the mind — a place where other people's sentences become raw material.
Filed under
Practice
4 pieces across the journal and notes, tagged“practice”.
Essays
All essays →The Cost of a Quick Look
We have optimised the way we look at the world, and we are beginning to notice what the optimisation removed.
Notes
All notes →The discipline of the small
A page a day is three hundred and sixty-five pages a year. A photograph a day is a record of a life. Ten minutes of reading before bed is more books than most people read.
The arithmetic is not the point. The point is that smallness is a strategy for continuing. It removes the excuse that there is not enough time, and it removes the drama that makes a missed day feel like a failed life.
What small practices do best is make the ordinary visible. Not the achievement, but the accumulation. A year of small things is not a small year.
A note on handwriting
My handwriting has been getting worse for years, and I have stopped minding. It was never beautiful. It was a tool for getting words out of the head before they cooled.
But there is something in the bad handwriting that typing cannot reproduce: the record of speed. You can see where I hurried, where I paused, where a thought arrived faster than the pen. The page has a pulse.
I would not want anyone to read my notebooks. That is not what they are for. They are not a record of what I thought. They are a record of thinking — the messy, physical, temporary thing that precedes the sentence.