I have been keeping a quote spreadsheet for a number of years now. It came in handy when I started my daily quote project the summer after first year. It still comes in handy now.
I’ve always felt a desire to hang onto things, to document them. Whether it was through photography or sound recording I wanted to capture things.
In high school I started a quote notebook with one of my friends. We wanted to remember all the funny things people were saying, all the inside jokes. Spoken words are fleeting, we wanted to put them down on paper.
While listening to an episode of Other Ppl with Brad Listi (I don’t remember who the guest was currently) I learned about commonplace books, notebooks that people took notes in but mostly recorded quotes from books they’d read. It was basically what I was doing.
One of the things we have talked a lot about in my thesis class is taking notes and keeping track of everything. I learned the value of making citations as you go a long time ago through painful midnight desperation as an undergrad but I am still wrangling with the project of how to keep track of things. I am trying to find effective workflows and habits that keep things organized and let me get stuff done.
It’s an endless struggle, staying on top of all of it, trying to impose order on the chaos of my scattered existence. My project for the month is to tackle my piles of books. Some of them are books that I’ve read but need to go through. For thesis, for a project of some kind. Something I need to learn a good system for doing.
One of the piles amongst the piles is one of commonplace books. The introductions all tell a similar story and I am delighted I came across these things.
It seems that this impulse to store quotes somewhere is a very common one across time. I have the bonus of being able to do it in a digital, searchable form that is easy to carry around — I originally started in a notebook but it had an altercation with a spilled cup of coffee and didn’t survive.
Here are some of the quotes:
“Commonplace books have been an engaging adjunct of literary performance for hundred of years. Everyone knows this, and most of us, one way or another, have kept commonplace books of our own, notebooks in which we copy out fragments from our reading, anything that seems especially trenchant or felicitous”
“Some such books are famous, of course, those assembled by William Byrd and Thomas Jefferson and W. H. Auden, for instance; but hundreds and hundreds have been published. Some scholars think the original commonplace books were kept by medieval philosophers and natural scientists for purposes of research and in preparing arguments; but this is fanciful. The idea is universal”
“The Commonplace Book, on the other hand, was not written for publication. It is above all a private document, a record of the personal concerns which Tawney rarely, if ever, confided or shared with his contemporaries in his correspondence and writings”
“Yet he amorphous design and idosyncratic construction of the Commonplace Book contributes greatly to its intellectual coherence and forcefulness. Without an audience, which more likely than not would have been composed of people who did not share his religious frame of mind, Tawney achieved in this diary a clarity and simplicity of style seldom equalled in his later work. There are none of the intricate allusions or the heaviness of rhetoric which give to his later prose its characteristic flavour of elaborate and elegant irony. Instead he wrote his diary directly and unselfconsciously in an introspective dialogue with what he called the voice of conscience within him”
“For as far back as I can remember I have been attracted by lovely, white sheets of virgin paper. As a child I quickly and enthusiastically defaced these with elaborate drawings of fierce naval battles. Later on I took to buying, when funds allowed, rather nice-looking large notebooks into which I copied, in my best italic script, poems I intended to learn — but rarely did — or pieces of prose that pleased me. I doubt if I ever filled more than ten pages of any of these commonplace books before a new and more handsome one caught my eye; and I would start all over again. Almost all of them have been lost, abandoned or destroyed. But a few years ago I struck out on a slightly different line; instead of attractive, expensive books of blank paper (and some of the modern Italian ones are very tempting) I took to buying the cheapest school exercise books, feint-ruled, and scribbling in my now nearly illegible hand the odds and ends that have caught my eye — much of it, I expect, familiar to you — and it is from these exercise books that I have culled these pages. There is no theme or shape to all this, but now and then I have placed a few things side by side, as the contrast or similarity amused me, and I have interjected a few one-liners — just for the hell of it”
“G. E. Moore expressed a wish that after his death, I should go through his philosophical papers and consider the possibility of preparing a selection of them for publication. These papers include nine notebooks, written at various times between 1919 and 1953 and containing his “Commonplace Book”. Only the last six notebooks were actually given this name by Moore himself; but the three earlier ones are of exactly the same character and it seemed clearly right to include them”
“His decision to keep a Commonplace Book was an act of conscious continuity”
“The six years of war from 1940 to 1945 occasioned in Forster a fuller use of his Commonplace Book than any equivalent period over the four decades he kept it. Affection for a now inaccessible France which he feared he might never see again seems likely to lie behind his copying out of so many extracts from French authors”
“Commonplaces: My difficulty in making them is that I shall not know what they are about until they are finished. Bp. Jebb seems to have known and never to have beens surprised by any development in his own thought. This, even more than neatness of handwriting and aptness of quotation, separates him from his successor, who continues on his work after an interval of a hundred and twenty one years. Apparently, if he had an idea he could put it down as he had it. But perhaps what he had were not ideas but certified topics that could be carried about intact. I must know what is inside me before I can tell what I am after. Perhaps, if I get through a dozen pages of this book, I shall tell, and my New Ethic result. Each commonplace will be very short: how pleasant it would be to feel copious as well as fluid”
Communicating this information in quote form seems a fitting approach.
I enjoy how much attention is devoted to paper, to the physical things on which the Commonplace Books were recorded.