Beginnings
I started my first commonplace book in the summer after a bad year, when reading was the only thing that still felt useful. The notebook was cheap and the pen was borrowed, but the act of copying — slow, deliberate, faintly ceremonial — gave me something to do with my hands while the rest of me caught up.
What I didn’t understand then was that I was building a small machine for paying attention. Each entry was a vote for what I wanted to keep.
What goes in
Sentences, mostly. Sometimes whole paragraphs if they earn the room. Occasionally a fragment of overheard conversation, a recipe, a friend’s offhand remark that turned out to be wiser than they meant it.
The rule is simple: if I want to remember it in five years, it goes in. If I’m copying it because it sounds clever, I put the pen down.
What stays out
News. Most of it, anyway. The commonplace book is not a feed. It is the opposite of a feed — a place where things are slowed down enough to be looked at twice.
After nine years
I have eleven volumes now, lined up on a shelf I built badly. They are the most honest autobiography I will ever write, because I didn’t know I was writing one.