Into the Commonplace

Recently in my reading, I came across a new, old idea: the Commonplace Book. The commonplace book–or commonplacing–was the practice of keeping a notebook or journal where you would jot down phrases & passages from things you read that you wanted to remember & use later on. It’s similar to the notes you might keep for a class, except this was a notebook kept over a whole lifetime, a summary of all the places the reading mind had rambled.

Susan Wise Bauer–in her book The Well-Educated Mind: A guide to the classical education you never had–describes them as “artificial memories,” saying:

When we sit in front of Plato or Shakespeare or Conrad, “simple reading” isn’t enough. We must learn to fix our minds, to organize our reading so that we are able to retain the skeleton of ideas that pass in front of our eyes....How is this done? By keeping a journal to organize your thoughts about your reading. What we write, we remember. What we summarize in our own words becomes our own.

According to Ms. Wise Bauer, the commonplace book is quite different from what we now think of as a journal or diary, which has become a place to reflect on your feelings & record the ephemera of day to day life. The commonplace book is externalized, looking outside the keeper, interlacing her mind with the books & thinkers encountered on a daily basis. On a surface level, many online commentators see blogging as a form of the commonplace book.

Famous examples of commonplace books were kept by Thomas Jefferson, the poet Milton, and the novelist EM Forster. You can browse through Jefferson’s Commonplace Books online at the Library of Congress. Leafing through them, it is a little awe-inspring to see long passages from Euripedes copied out longhand IN GREEK and think of the contrast between that man’s mind & the current uncurious, unread occupant of the White House....but that’s a subject for another day.

I’ve been keeping my own commonplace book recently, and doing it the old-fashioned way: longhand. At first I thought I would keep it on my computer. For my own writing, I use a nifty piece of software called MacJournal, which is a sort of freeform electronic blank book where I dump first drafts of everything. I tend to work in a very non-linear way; its open endedness makes it ideal to catch little pieces of writing that maybe aren’t ready for their own file on my hard drive.

My first inclination was to keep my commonplace book in MacJournal as well. But lately I’ve been consciously trying to break my reading habit away from the computer. Too often if I’m on the computer–or even just near it–I’m one eye on reading & one eye on everything else: surfing the web, checking email, downloading music, blogging, whatevering. My computer has become an extension of my own jabbering brain, and I’m using the commonplace book as another way to try & put the brakes on it. Commonplacing in an actual, physical notebook says –to me at least–this is more than just a database of things I want to remember. It highlights reading as the slow, rough hewn work of my own hand & mind.

Great Books

To continue where I left off with my last post & my dread over losing touch with the written word: with my usual manic fervor, I launched myself on an ambitious new reading program.

Now don’t laugh: I’m reading the Great Books. Literally, the Great Books. The Great Books of the Western World (also here) were a series put together by American philosopher & pedagogue Mortimer Adler in the mid-1940’s, an encyclopedic survey of the bedrock of Western thought from Homer to Freud that was published by the Encyclopedia Britannica.

I first learned about the Great Books when I was a senior in high school from watching a documentary about Adler on PBS . In the documentary, Adler & a group of students were discussing some idea or other (Justice? Liberty? Freedom?) in the most brilliant way imaginable, like a modern day Socrates & his disciples in that market at Athens. For me, it was a seductive image.

Now, this was back in the late 80’s, and the idea of the Great Books was very much under attack, particularly at my college, Oberlin. The notion of “Great Books” was seen as little more than a trophy case for dead white-guy writers. But still they kept luring me back, always with a certain guilt & fascination. “I am! I am reading Toni Morrison,” I would say by day, while secretly longing for Herodotus at night. (And while Morrison has not cracked the Great Books glass ceiling in the most recent edition, they did add Virginia Woolf & Willa Cather…)

Mostly, it was the idea of The Set, the set itself of the Great Books, that always exerted this strange pull on me. On one level, it’s just a list or syllabus. You could easily pick up copies of the books individually. Yet whenever I saw a complete set in a used book store, I would linger near it, like a junior high kid repeatedly walking by the house of his crush.

Finally, I gave in. I bought a set in mint condition on eBay for $125. They are sitting in a giant gilt (guilt?) bound pile next to my TV stand. During "Project Runway," I’m forced to look around them to see the TV. I need new bookshelves in my apartment just to hold them all (they take up four linear feet of shelf space!). I’m currently midway through reading Volume 4: Homer.

I currently have more books in my house than I will ever read in a lifetime. I am a slow, methodical reader. I don’t tend to read books so much as memorize them. And my mind tends to wander. A lot. So why more? And why this giant relic of a library, like a bunch of bric-a-brac you find stuffed in a hat box at the back of your dead aunt’s closet?

According to Stuff White People Like, there are number of cultural artifacts that survive sheerly through white guilt: classical music & Penguin classics chief among them. Moi = guilty of both….

So as I wind my way through the 54 volumes, I’ll let you know what answers emerge. I will either come out exceedingly wise or end up back on the road of foolishness. Leafing through them as I unpacked them, I had the distinct sense they had never been read before. Someone must have bought them thirty, forty years ago, and then…they…sat. On a shelf. Unread. The description on eBay said “picked up at an estate sale,” so it may be that in another forty years, they’ll be back on eBay, their spines still barely cracked, their pages unmarked & unloved. I’ll keep you posted.

The last couple weeks, I’ve been under the spell of an article I read in The Atlantic called “Is Google Making Us Stupid”, which put the fear of God into me when it comes to reading. I’m talking about good old-fashioned, sitting with a book for hours reading, which I’ve noticed has become more & more difficult for me over the last couple years. Apparently I’m not alone. The writer of the article–Nicholas Carr–compares himself to the computer HAL in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” who forlornly moans, “Dave, my mind is going,” as the astronaut piece by piece pulls his brain offline.

Carr feels that in the internet age, our ability to read is paradoxically diminished by the web. A paradox since the Web is of course rich in words, but it is writing that is constantly pushing you toward something else, both through the hyperlink as well as the database-like structure of the internet. It encourages a restless, wandering kind of reading. Carr says:

Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski.

In my own life, I had experienced the same shift. “I can’t finish a book anymore,” I’d complain to people who I knew to be readers. At first I assumed it was just my own life: getting older, the demands of work taking over, concentration maxed out on other concerns (like who lost on “Project Runway” this week). Maybe reading had lost it’s usefullness.

Carr’s own feelings on how the web influences not just the contents of our minds, but the very way in which our minds work clicked for me. He quotes researcher Maryanne Wolf, who says, “We are not only what we read. We are how we read.” Our brains, in other words, take on the very quality of the the way in which we gather information. Where before I might submerge myself in the deep, long-thought of a book, suddenly my mind was skittish, difficult to hold onto. Concentration waned. Given this dreary state of affairs, I was surprised I even had the mental capacity left to get through the entire Atlantic article.

In my life, I fully embrace the web, use & refer & defer to it constantly. I accept that the world & the tools we use to master it are changing. I’m just not sure I want to be the change myself. The book is a fundamental part of who I am, the hours spent whirling around behind its pages, just as say video & computer games are to my brother. I can feel the spell & lure of a digitally modified existence, but feel like something has gone missing, some intrinsic part of myself nurtured through all those years of reading.

So I set out on a new course, which I’ll tell you about next time….

Aesthetics of the LA Fire

LA living idealized in the famous photograph by architectural photographer Julius Shulman...





























...as compared with the reality last night--May 8, 2007--as fire swept through Griffith Park. These aren't of course the same house, but the dream must have been the same.