Thinking of Starting a Commonplace Book?

Commonplace, Story Scholar

In this two-part video series, I explain how I use index cards for commonplacing, and then “query” my notes in order to compose a personal essay.

I also offer some tips for best practices that I’ve gleaned over the years of keeping my Zettelkasten.

Part 1: How to Connect Your Ideas

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Whether you’re working in a commonplace book or a Zettelkasten, I recommend a few practices that can make your notes more powerful through connection and combination:

Create indexes for your entries.
1. You might index:
  1. A theme you’re interested in;
  2. People who come up in your reading and research;
  3. Keywords that recur in your notes, or that you want to read more about;
  4. The titles of books you excerpt from.
2. Use dualities like “friendship vs. animosity” rather than separating them out into individual keywords or headings.
Keep headings or keywords simple, but make titles intriguing, so they suggest further ideas or questions.
Cross-reference your entries.
1. Use page numbers or card references to link relevant entries together.
2. Include unexpected cross-references that get you thinking or that amuse you.
Follow the sources.
1. Mine the indexes of books you read for potential keywords.
2. Continue your research or line of inquiry by looking up references in the bibliography of the book you’re reading (or in allusions and influences for fiction).
Make a mind-map.
1. A mindmap can allow you to spot further connections between the concepts you’re interested in.

Part 2: How to Use Your Commonplace Notes to Compose a Personal Essay

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When I set out to write this essay, I think I had in mind something very pragmatic and methodical, but what emerged as I consulted card after card reminded me of the reason for keeping these notes in the first place. You might think it’s for remembering — though remembering to what end is often a less obvious question. What do we really hope to accomplish by our diligent simplification, compartmentalisation and categorisation of the (literary) world around us?

“On waxen tables you cannot write anything new until you rub out the old. With the mind it is not so; there you cannot rub out the old till you have written in the new.” – Sir Francis Bacon

Whatever the impulse, it’s a very ancient one, and it’s only when I looked through my own notes that I recognised that, part of the delight of keeping commonplaces and cabinets or “machines” lies in the fact that others do it as well.

Commonplacing is an activity that is social in very interesting ways:

First of all, it places you in a long line of thinkers who have also written out excerpts.
You are not only the inheritor of the tradition, but you are also the inheritor of many excerpts and thoughts about excerpts that have been popularly circulated.
In fact, commonplacing is a way to engage with the literary tradition without having to produce a “unified,” “unique” body of “personal” work. I place those adjectives in quotation marks, because of course a commonplace is an art / a practice of unification, and of course it’s unique and personal to the individual who’s collating, copying and often commenting on the selections.
Many ancient texts are preserved in fragments that have been copied into — granted, not “commonplaces” but — encyclopaedias and anthologies.
Similarly, sometimes commentaries on an original text can be as frequently quoted as the text itself.
Even after books became ubiquitous, commonplace books remained a valuable heirloom, suggesting that their importance for the reader lies in something beyond simply access to texts.

“A prime example of stockpiling motivated by a notion of service to the common good is offered by Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc (1580–1637), a nobleman of Aix- en-Provence and an abundant note- taker though he published virtually nothing.” – Too Much to Know by Ann M. Blair

Michel Foucault uses the term “technologies of self” to encompass that “which permit[s] individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality”; and commonplace notebooks naturally fit this purpose, if not exemplify it. They are a way of reconstituting yourself through the words of others, so that “many heads” are put together.

In all discourses, commonplace books both divide and unite. They divvy up excerpts into categories under a variety of “heads,” but they also bring these disparate elements into collaboration. A metaphor that recurs in this discussion is that of the honey-bee that collects nectar and pollen and stores it in the honeycomb. “Anthologies” & “florilegia” expand the metaphor, as does the use of wax tablets for temporary notetaking and organisation.

The comparison also reminded me of the Sufi concept of dhawq that I had recently been reading about — and here is one other point I wanted to make, about the unification of time as well as texts. The word, meaning ‘taste’, is often explained through the metaphor of honey. You can read an elaborate description of what chemicals constitute honey, how it’s produced, and what are its “notes”, but until you put some in your own mouth, you have no real grasp of its true nature. Information can be shared, but knowledge can only be gained through personal, private experience. And this is not experience that is merely sensory but a heart-felt gnosis that is sacred and delicious.

Commonplacing as a mere “intellectual” pursuit has sometimes been ridiculed, and even the act of writing criticised for encouraging forgetting.

“… What say you, Mary? For you are a young lady of deep reflection, I know, and read great books, and make extracts.”
Mary wished to say something very sensible, but knew not how.
“While Mary is adjusting her ideas,” he continued, “let us return to Mr. Bingley.”
– Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

But I think there is greater loss in forgetting the potential that lies in the practice of writing. You might forget, in the intense eagerness to figure out how best to catalogue and index your excerpts, that you are engaging in a writing practice that can put you in touch with the knowing of the heart as well as the “apprisal” of the brain. That your commonplace notebook can become a microcosm for the trust that you place in yourself and the world around you to supply you with what you need at the moment — be that a piece of symbology that connects the disparate ideas that were floating untethered in your awareness, or a comforting quotation from “beyond the veil” that eases your discomfort in your present dilemma; perhaps that even changes your perspective to such a degree that you perceive the power in yourself as the “writer” of these materials, giving the gifts of greater awareness to yourself, eternally, through the words of others that you wrote yourself.

Commonplace books were frequently inherited by the friends, family, or students of their creator. But what this exploration has made me recognise is that they themselves were the most fortunate inheritors. Not of the physical volumes or slip-box, but of the capacity of constantly remembering from many ‘heads’ what is eternal and will never stop responding to their queries.