Fast
away the old year passes,
Fa-la-la-la-la, la la, la la!
Hail the new ye lads and lasses!
— melody of ancient Welsh origin, words probably 19th century American
During the Renaissance, the practice of keeping a book called a
"commonplace" sprang up. Aristocratic readers used leather-bound
volumes to copy out favorite passages of poetry or prose that they
encountered in their reading. It was a way to organize what was
regarded as "information overload" in those days. Most books belonged
to libraries rather than to individuals, so a reader couldn't underline
a portion of text or stick a bookmark in a favorite spot and come back
to it later. Nor were there mechanical copying devices that would allow
a person to cut and paste a notebook of the words of others.
A man I taught with for many years kept commonplace books. He was a
sweet, gentle soul who never called much attention to himself, lived
alone, and attended the same men's bible study every week for more than
fifty years. At his funeral his sisters displayed some of the notebooks
he'd kept, each a commonplace with the day and date noted and one or
two passages copied out in his spidery hand each day. I was familiar
with that hand from the notes he'd sent me from time to time after his
retirement, and seeing his books made me feel close to him again.
I keep my commonplace along with my personal journal. I use a plain
8½ x 11 top-bound spiral notebook with lined pages. I like a
messy, organic quality to my journal. (Well, maybe I don't
like it, exactly, but it is the only
process that works for me.) I keep the notebook with me and open nearly
all the time. So my pages have copied out passages of other people's
thoughts from whatever I'm reading that day, pasted-in scraps of things
I can cut out of magazines and such, passages of writing practice, as
well as personal thoughts and observations and the traditional "I had a
pork chop for dinner" diary notations*. That's how the Buechner
quotation I led the
Feast of Stephen
piece with came to be the heading for December 26, 1995. I was either
using
Listening to Your Life,
a daybook made up of brief passages selected from all of his work, or
reading
Telling Secrets, the
third volume of his autobiography, that day.
During this month of participating in Holidailies I've been reading
around in the other journals kept by those who joined the portal. One
is
Watermark, an elegant set of
pages by poet Sharon Brogan, who lives in Montana, the landscape that
calls to me. One section of her site she has set up as a
commonplace, and she
intends to transcribe the bits of wisdom she has accumulated in her
paper journals.
I've taken inspiration from this. I have space at
TypePad, a service that offers
blogging capability to people who don't want to (or, like me, can't
figure out how to) do it on their own. I started it when I was on the
road in August and couldn't use the transfer protocols my traditional
site requires because I was using public connections. I called my blog
The
Open Page, which sounds like a nifty name for a commonplace
book. The space is paid for through next August, but I haven't done
anything with it since my last post from Vermont. I think it's time to
make some use of it again.
The first set of quotations, all the epigraphs I've used for my
year-end letter, will go up dated January 1, 2005. Please, do visit.
