A Commonplace Book

"A witty saying proves nothing."

Pereant, inquit, qui ante nos nostra dixerunt.
"Confound those who have said our remarks before us."

Even those students who do not keep track of quotations in private journals are on the lookout for good sayings. Dorm-room doors boast white boards with "quote of the day" sections; common rooms have forums for people to write the favorite things they've heard or read; student papers often begin with quotations. Such public quoting is different from the interiority of private scribbling. It says something about you, not to you. It makes a statement, and (as we all remember from our college years) making a statement, too, is an important part of this phase of development. See how intellectual I am? See how cynical and worldly the inhabitants of this Nietzsche-quoting dorm are? I'm unique! I've got a bizarro sense of humor! These public quotes are bumper stickers for people who don't spend a lot of time in cars.

While I find the urge to collect the words and wisdom of others an understandable way to mark one's developing self -- and not a bad way to spend time -- I do have some nagging questions about all this quoting . I wonder if transcription isn't sometimes standing in for thinking, as in the days of copy books. Or if bite-sized bytes of pithiness are all we can attend to. I wonder about what this means about how college students are reading. Are they just seeking nuggets of truth, without paying heed to the context in which they're mining? And what about attribution -- do they know anything about the writers, thinkers, artists, or activists whom they are quoting? Do they make a distinction between characters in novels and authors? When they see a quote that they really like, does it impel them to find out more about the writer, to read more and more deeply, or do they let the quote stand alone?

My friends who are professors tell me that students often try to have quotations do the interpretative work for them, that they let replication replace analysis, that the collective attention span of today's college generation has shortened even more than that of the MTV-watchers of my generation. The Internet has made it not only possible, but easy, to search for nubbins of information. You can always go deeper (I guess that's the idea behind hypertext), but my sense is that many people don't; there are too many competing demands on time. We've become a society of skimmers.

There were occasions when Shakespeare was a very bad writer indeed. You can see how often in books of quotations. People who like quotations love meaningless generalizations.

Every academic by now knows the routine. You come across a pithy quote by a famous author that doesn't sound quite right. No source text is given. A general web search yields ten pages of links to self-help sites or quote-a-day webpages. A Google Books or Google Scholar search will offer links to published self-help books or articles going back to the 1980s. None of the sites will offer a full citation or even gesture toward a source text. You sadly conclude that the quote is bogus. Such is academic life in the age of the search engine.

When people are very quotable, it can make it harder to listen to what they actually have to say.

And what are Aphorisms?

White lies! Dumb lines!
Stupid jokes!

I am no special fan of most books of quotations. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, The Yale Book of Quotations, and The New Penguin Dictionary of Modern Quotations, to name three dependable reference books, are invaluable, for sure, as repositories of literary and verbal history. (Countless other books of quotations aren't reliable at all, and the less said about quotation sites on the Internet the better.) But even the best contain a good deal of dead weight. They lean, sometimes necessarily, on canned and overused thought and, grievously, are skewed to the upbeat. So many of the lines they contain seem to vie to be stitched onto throw pillows or ladled, like soup, over the credulous soul. "Almost all poetry is a failure," Charles Bukowski contended, "because it sounds like somebody saying, Look, I have written a poem." The same is true of quotations and aphorisms. So many have a taxidermied air, as if they were self-consciously aimed at posterity.

The general public, however, has relied upon the use of unsourced quotations to make arguments more credible as well as interesting. So have leaders in business and government.