A Commonplace Book

One physicist, confronting the prospect of death, is said to have consoled himself with the thought that at least he would never again have to look up the word 'hermeneutics.'

A sure sign of information overload, lists are what we draw up when we have too much on our minds.... Of course, not all list making signifies intellectual crisis (today's shopping list seldom becomes a cri de coeur), and in certain fields, like botany and zoology, which made dramatic advances with printing, lists are quite natural. But when list making spills over into unexpected areas, chiefly literary, we are justified in calling attention to it as a symptom of intellectual dislocation.

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.