A Commonplace Book

I began to keep a reading diary. Not very dramatic as turning points go, but there it is. A lifetime later, rereading these notebooks, I saw that the lines I copied out, the words I deemded worth fixing forever in the standing now of my own handwriting, clumped up with unlikely frequency toward the start of any new book. The magic quotes thinned out over any book's length. the curve was linear and invariable. Perhaps writers everywhere crowded their immortal bits up toward the front of their books, like passengers clamoring to get of a bus. More likely, reading, for me, meant the cashing out of verbal eternity in favor of story's forward motion. Trapping me in the plot, each passing line left me less able to reach for my notebook and fix the sentence in time.

Commonplace books sanction the selection of passages made significant by personal experience and conscience. Many commonplace passages urge contentment and console the reader on the imminence of death, while also containing traces that indicate the particular character of the possessor. One book dated ca. 1670, for example, lists under "Precepts of liveing" thirty-seven short, numbered verses in couplets, seldom exceeding six lines, that turn the commandments into memorizable verse.

As Max W. Thomas puts it, "commonplace books are about memory, which takes both material and immaterial form; the commonplace book is like a record of what that memory might look like". The commonplace book exists to serve the commonplace storehouse of the mind, to assist the learner to master knowledge and wisdom, even, as Erasmus thought, all knowledge.

Perhaps no other aspect of the reading culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries defines that reading culture as pervasively as the concept of the commonplace.

Called locus communis in Latin and topos koinos in Greek, commonplaces are, according to Aristotle, the seats of arguments or pigeonholes of the mind where one could find material for an oration (Lechner 1-2). In this sense, the commonplace resembles what we might today call a heading. Used for the sake of argument, these headings allowed an orator to divide a topic into its many parts, and would typically include definition, cause, effect, opposites, likenesses as well as others. In addition to these classifications, locus communis has refered to collections of sayings (in effect, formulas) on various topics--such as loyalty, decadence, friendship, or wha- tever--that could be worked into ones own speech-making or writing (Ong, 111). These two meanings of commonplace Ong refers to as analytic and cumulative. If the commonplace book is an example of the cumulative, it is informed by the analytic.

Although the primacy of philosophy long remained unshaken in the universities, humanists gradually established the primacy of rhetoric in secondary education. They did so by means of a curriculum, the studia humanitatis, which chiefly comprised grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy.

This curriculum was inculcated by means of commonplace notebooks, the direct descendants of medieval florilegia. Students compiled these notebooks in the course of their readings in order to create a stock of ideas for their own speeches and compositions.

When it came time to put away childish things, the role of the copy book was assumed by its close cousin, the "commonplace book." The process of maturation required the production of more-personal collections of writings, meant to provide inspiration, direction, and moral fortitude. Reading the commonplace books of historical figures like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, or any number of antebellum Southern ladies gives us an interior view of each person's self-image and the words that motivated him or her.

I set to work organizing a book project, with the idea that if I could lay out the ideas and structure so the whole was visible at once, the actual process of writing would resolve itself into two simpler components: the writing down and the writing up. But the system failed me -- or rather, I failed it. There are plenty of books that are written in just that way, and you can tell right off; the commonplace book survives in the academic treatise whether or not one actually numbers the paragraphs.

Commonplace books are not so uncommon. Virginia Woolf kept one. So did Samuel Johnson. W. H. Auden published his, as did the poet J. D. McClatchy. E. M. Forster's was issued after his death. The novelist David Markson wrote terse and enveloping novels that resembled commonplace books; they were bird's nests of facts threaded with the author's own subtle interjections. For fans of the genre, many prize examples have come from lesser-known figures such as Geoffrey Madan and Samuel Rogers, both English, who issued commonplace books that are notably generous and witty and illuminating. These have become cult items. The literary critic Christopher Ricks said about Rogers that, although he may not have been a kind man, "he was very good at hearing what was said."