Why Keep a Commonplace Book?

A commonplace book is not a journal. A journal is a record of one’s own writing; a commonplace book is a record of someone else’s. It is the transcribing, slowly and inspectingly, of a sentence or passage from our private reading which has arrested our attention, has made us pause to wonder over both what it means and how it was constructed to say what it means so well.

A commonplace book is not necessarily filled only with purple passages found standing grandly in the annals of literature. Sometimes we come upon a single sentence that seems well organized, and we pause to consider how its punctuation contributes to its effect: While we were flying through calm weather with little turbulence, the captain suddenly made a frightening announcement: “Flight attendants, take your jump seats immediately” (a sentence I didn’t read, but did hear on a flight recently). Why a colon instead of a comma to introduce the quoted remarks? What is the purpose of the comma after attendants, and is it optional or necessary? Does that comma serve the same purpose as the comma after turbulence? Copying a sentence into our commonplace book (including always, of course, the author’s name and the source) helps make us aware of details we might otherwise overlook, thereby taking away a chance to learn from the close work of other writers.

Sometimes, though, we record a passage of two or three sentences which together build a rhetorical effect we want to learn from. Here is such a selection from the German writer Karl Vossler’s Mediaeval Culture (1929). Vossler is comparing the German Goethe’s Faust with the Italian Dante’s Divine Comedy, and our attention is drawn less to the construction of any one of these three sentences than to the way Vossler has succeeded in using each to build a crescendo to an ironic conclusion: the noun decorum, which typically characterizes the heart of a classical, stately, poised bearing—qualities at the opposite extreme of what got Dante there: his own force and sensitiveness pushed to the uttermost limits of passion:

These radically different fashions of living, thinking, and working have coloured deeply both the poems. If one takes the philosophical passages of the Divine Comedy, e.g. the didactic bits, he feels everywhere the passionate energy of reason, a rapid and sharp incisiveness which may rise to the driest and harshest precision. If one takes the more stirring, lyric, dramatic, satirical passages, there is always in evidence a peculiarly Southern mingling of force and sensitiveness, which with a phrase, with a single word, now reaches out to the uttermost limits of passion and in the next instant is forced back by the imperious will into the bounds of decorum.

Keeping a commonplace book belongs to that tradition of artistic training which believes in the importance of models. Here, in the dignified prose of the late-eighteenth century (including both antiquated spelling and uncustomary capitalization), Sir Joshua Reynolds, in his Discourses on Art (a work which the American critic Irving Babbitt calls “perhaps the best statement of the classical point of view in English”), gives an analogous reason why writers would take the trouble to model and ponder over sentences and passages of other authors as painters do of paintings:

By studying these authentick models, that idea of excellence which is the result of the accumulated experience of past ages, may be at once acquired; and the tardy and obstructed progress of our predecessors may teach us a shorter and easier way. The Student receives, at one glance, the principles which many Artists have spent their whole lives in ascertaining; and, satisfied with their effect, is spared the painful investigation by which they came to be known and fixed.

The literary models we transcribe thoughtfully, like the great works which aspiring painters examine so closely (Reynolds says that Rome itself, with its works of Michelangelo all about, was a veritable academy for Raphael) can become our textbook, and by studying those models carefully, we can become, as students, another teacher to ourselves. The American literary critic and teacher Wayne C. Booth, in his The Vocation of a Teacher, raises this cooperative work of studying and teaching to its consequential heights:

Whether society quite knows what it wants…, what it really seeks, more or less blindly [from its teachers], is to keep the rational habits passionately alive in the world. Only if we do that job well, by the way we think, the way we teach, and the way we write, can we claim that we have honored the society that we are in and the society that is in us.

In the end, every artist finds his or her own way. But as Reynolds also says, “It may be laid down as a maxim, that he who begins by presuming on his own sense, has ended his studies as soon as he has commenced them.”

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