A Commonplace Book, Six Months In

Six months ago I started keeping a commonplace book — a single notebook where I copy out sentences worth keeping, by hand, without commentary at first. This is a report from inside the habit, not a recommendation. I don’t know yet if it works.

The rule I gave myself

One rule: nothing goes in that I haven’t read twice. The friction is the point. Anyone can highlight; the transcription is what forces the sentence through you.¹

The tradition is older and stranger than the productivity version of it suggests. Renaissance students kept loci communes — commonplaces — as a way of storing arguments they might need, sorted under headings.² Mine is unsorted, which is probably a mistake I’ll correct later.

What actually changed

Three things, in order of surprise:

1. I read more slowly, because I read with a pen.
2. I remember where things are, not just that they exist.
3. I quote myself back to myself, months later, and it lands differently.

That third one is the strange one. A sentence I copied in July means something else in January, and the notebook is the only place I can watch that happen.³

Footnotes

1. I wrote about the friction of second readings in On Reading Slowly. ↩

2. Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford University Press, 1996), 1–7. ↩

3. This is also the thread of my thesis, Memory, Repetition, and the Commonplace Book. ↩