My Commonplace Book

What a 50-page Word document says about a decade of my life

About ten years ago, I started copying passages and quotes from my reading into a Word document. When I came across something that inspired me or resonated in some way that I wanted to remember or return to, I copied it into the document. 

Some quotes were just a line. Some were paragraphs or longer passages from books. Some were poems. They were largely about creativity, writing, philosophy, spirituality, aging, mortality—the topics I was passionate about. Often they were about facing challenges and enduring hardship.

I had never heard of a commonplace book. I just started saving quotes and passages I liked and wanted to remember. I think what I needed at the time was an anchor, and words have always anchored me. I was in a period of hardship and looking—maybe without realizing it-- for perspective beyond my own limited view and a reminder of the bigger picture. I was seeking wisdom—and comfort—from other writers and thinkers I admired who had navigated challenges and hardship.

I never knew there was a name for what I was doing.  Then, a few years ago, I came across a description of a commonplace book and realized that’s what I’d been creating.

What’s a commonplace book?

Oxford Languages Dictionary defines a commonplace book as “a book into which notable extracts from other works are copied for personal use.” It’s different from a journal or morning pages, since you’re typically copying passages from someone else’s work, but it can also be a place to keep your own notes, thoughts, and ideas.

“For centuries, authors and thinkers have kept commonplace books: focused journals that serve to collect thoughts, quotes, moments of introspection, transcribed passages from reading — anything of purpose worth reviewing later.” 

-Kevin Eagan, Critical Margins

In his post on Medium, Eagan defined it as a sort of “thinker’s journal”. According to Masterclass, writers and thinkers have been keeping commonplace books pretty much since antiquity—as far back as the Roman Empire and throughout the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment. Writers including Mark Twain, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Virginia Woolf kept commonplace books. So did Ronald Reagan and Bill Gates.

The traditional commonplace book, of course, was handwritten.  Mine is digital because much of what I was reading was online; if it was in an actual physical book, I typed it out into the document.

For the last few years, I haven’t added much to it. I got busier, other things took priority, and it’s been dormant for awhile.  I didn’t forget about it exactly, but I stopped actively adding to it.

When I looked at it again recently, I was struck by the quantity of quotes and passages I’d collected over the years—it’s about 50 pages long. Rereading it is revisiting the last ten years of my life; it’s a reflection of my inner world over the past decade.

What I see now is that it was a way of being in conversation with kindred spirits.

I was struck, too, by the way the quotes told a kind of story. Much as photos represent various eras of our lives, the collection of quotes and passages is a record of an era in my inner life. Each quote spoke to me in some way at the time, and most of them still do. Traveling through those pages now, they read like a different kind of personal narrative, a map of the mind and spirit.

Maybe I should let them see the light of day again. Maybe I’ll include a quote with my posts here as a way to honor that chapter of my life and share the inspiration and wisdom that sustained me—and still does. I’ll start with this one:

“What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.”

-Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story

Have you ever kept a commonplace book or something similar?

A commonplace book, from George Redgrave on flickr (creative commons)