NOTE: Today’s guest post is from Judith Culpepper, a retired educator with over 40 years experience teaching grammar and literature to middle school students in classical schools. She wrote this article because her best friend asked her to and because it sounded more interesting than pulling weeds or wrangling cats, both of which are easier. And yes, she religiously keeps a commonplace, the latest entry being, “The thought has often come into my mind/If I shall ever see thy glorious behind” because she thought it was funny. She resides in Louisiana.
“I don’t write it down to remember it later, I write it down to remember it now.” -Umberto Eco
I love that quote because, at my age, remembering has taken on great importance, and why I began keeping a commonplace book. There are as many reasons, methods, and motivations as there are commonplace keepers. But what is a commonplace book and how does it differ from a diary or a date book?
A commonplace book is a personal depository for meaningful ideas, quotes, information, observations that one comes across in reading, conversations, or life.
The purpose of a commonplace is to organize those bits and pieces of information into thoughts and ideas in ways that are useful and accessible in our daily pursuits. In this way, it differs from a diary, because it gives us a place to ruminate on what we have read or heard, rather than just recording events or feelings. We write things down to remember them now and later.
From the early cave drawings in France (story? instructions? grocery list?) to the latest App, we humans are both sharers and collectors, and are always searching for ways to organize and display our collections. One of the most enduring methods for collecting ideas is a handwritten commonplace book.
The practice of keeping a commonplace comes to us from antiquity (topos koinos -G; locus communis – L). Marcus Aurelius, one of Rome’s early emperors, kept a commonplace of his philosophical musings which later became his book Meditations.
With the advent of the printing press, commonplaces (florilegia – M.A. “flowers of reading”) became much more popular and needful as people tried to keep up with the increased flow of information. Commonplaces became works of art, and were often passed from one generation to the next in dowries and legacies.
It is said the more things change, the more things stay the same. In this Information Age, we are inundated with more and more written material. It is difficult to find time to read, much less meditate on what we have read and then extrapolate lessons or devise new applications.
Friedrich Nietzsche supposedly said, “It’s hard enough for me to remember my opinions, without also having to remember my reasons for them!” A commonplace book does that for you. A commonplace book slows us down in our reading, giving us time to pause and reflect upon a beautiful turn of phrase, a compelling thought, or a delightful illustration. A commonplace helps us THINK.
So, how does one go about starting a commonplace?
A person who reads has probably already developed some system for marking favorite passages and quotes – highlighters, sticky notes, marginal notes. A commonplace book replaces that. It can be anything – a composition book, a more formal bound book such as a Moleskine, or even index cards. For years before he became president, Ronald Reagan kept his commonplace on index cards, shuffling and rearranging them by topic as he developed his philosophical ideas and wrote his speeches and books.
There are those who like to keep their commonplace on the computer and that certainly can help with organization of topics, and authors, for example, but there are drawbacks. Keeping a handwritten commonplace changes the process. Handwritten may seem silly or too laborious. But it is better, for several reasons.
Educational and memory research are demonstrating more and more that things written by hand are retained better than other methods of recording information.
The material we write out by hand is material we remember best.
The secondary benefit of that process is, we become much more selective about what we decide to copy. The quality of our collection improves because we become more selective about the things we spend our time copying. The cut/paste option on our computer makes it too easy to be shallow.
Quantity over quality is not what we are after in a commonplace book. Hand copying also gives us an opportunity to inhabit the mind of another person, to explore their grammar, sentence construction, vocabulary, and the writing itself, lingering over an unusual word or turn of phrase, savoring it as we would a fine wine.
Copying by hand trains the palate of our minds to love what is beautiful.
Finally, a handwritten commonplace provides a visual reminder of the places we have been and the ideas with which we have engaged. Part of the beauty of such a record is we can revisit frequently and easily, picking up conversations with authors we have loved, refreshing our acquaintance with them and deepening our experience, much like catching up with an old friend.
Christmas is around the corner, and we will all probably get new books as gifts. This is a perfect time to select a lovely journal and fine pen, and explore the delights of keeping a commonplace.
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