Keeping a commonplace book makes up part of what we can call our private reading, and private reading is so called because it refers to what we read to take care of ourselves—not our work, not someone else’s profits, but our own good wellbeing.
Private, though, has many notes and it can mean many things. We build a conceptual world with the ideas we read and reflect upon. That is how we can learn to become serious about serious matters, in part because when we read something that surprises or offends us, we can’t any longer get away with simply asserting ourselves and our cherished beliefs; the author can’t hear us, there will be no response to react to, and if we don’t think consideringly about what we have read, we will only be going in circles—saying to ourselves what we already believe, round and round: and we know in our bones that we’re just tracing roundels in the air.
Our private reading and the commonplace book we keep with it together call up the old idea of an intellectual life. That phrase will likely strike us now as quaint, but it once pointed to a region of human nature where more than our utilitarian preoccupations—all our planning and devising and calculating—went on. To the classical philosopher, human nature reached up to and beyond our thinking mind. That is the mind which uses language, and because of the objectivity language creates by naming all the things we come up against in the world, we come to realize that we too are some particular entity, that others exist and we with them. We realize with some shock that we cannot really account for the presence of things, including even ourselves. All this is part of our mental life, part of our reason made possible by language, which takes us to the edge of very large questions concerning each one of us. But all that thinking still does not constitute what is properly called an intellectual life.
To understand that, to understand what intellectual means in the central classical tradition, we have to agree to a different definition of human nature: that past our body and past our mind, we dwell as well in a noetic region, where not reason but insight determines the light by which we understand our profoundest instincts and impulsions. Thomas Aquinas averred that human beings are duplex, twofold or double, and he meant not the twins mind and body, but mind and intellect. The mind, we might say, is part of the body and the intellect is our awareness that the mind and its body will not satisfy our most searching questions. In the Aristotelian tradition from which Aquinas wrote in Latin, the mind, or soul, was named anima and the intellect, or spirit, animus or intellectus. The classical tradition thus saw a consequential difference between the soul and the spirit, whose Greek terms, revealingly, were psyche and nous.
These more careful distinctions are possible to understand only when we set ourselves up to ruminate over them, to consider them slowly, think out their implications and what consequences they might have for the assumptions we have grown up with but have not seriously questioned—not necessarily to controvert those beliefs, but at least to test them, to make sure we understand why we conclude and believe what we finally do. So, for example, we might add to our commonplace book a short sentence like “The imagination is the eye of the soul” (this from the Notebooks of the French essayist Joubert) and reflect on just what he meant by soul. What was the original French word that the translator read? How does this compare to Aquinas’s definition? Or if we transcribe the poet Keats’s line that we should understand the world not as a vale of tears, but as “a vale of Soul-making,” and that our work is “to school an Intelligence and make it a soul,” how are we to understand this without the finer distinctions our slow and ruminative private reading can make known to us?
Such close reading and transcribing have the collective powers to send us on our way far from our familiar mental surroundings, sometimes even to regions quite exotic where still other interior worlds might open before us. Language is our ticket for that journey, and our reflections the voyage itself. Our private reading and our commonplace book keep us on the road. And some travelers have ironically left word that at some far distance words themselves will fail. That, they say, is where insight begins.
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