There’s comfort, encouragement and inspiration to be found in the words of others, which is why you should start noting them down now…
It’s summer 1990 and I’m lying on Jo’s bedroom floor staring at a poster of Michael Stipe with the words “Buck, Mills, Berry, Me” written on his hand. I’m not sure I like REM but suspect that is because I am not cool, and I’m certain that means Jo is cool because she does. She also likes The Smiths and The Cure and she’s in the top set for French and reads Sartre in the original, and her parents don’t seem to mind if we smoke in her en-suite.
We are a smidge too young to legally drink and neither of us are driving yet so we spend a fair amount of time in Jo’s room listening to cheerfully miserable music, wishing we knew more musicians and that we were older and/or French. Like all teenagers we have a bunch of ‘in jokes’ that we think are hilarious and are confident that our genius is yet to be fully appreciated by our peers and teachers, while simultaneously nervous that we are not as witty as we hope.
Someone has given me a beautiful handmade notebook the size of a matchbox with a marbled paper cover. I feel under pressure to fill it with artful words but don’t have any myself so start writing down lines from our conversations and quotes from books and lyrics that seem meaningful at the time.
Jo sails through A-levels and soars off to uni to read French, and I crash through mine and get swept up by clearing and deposited in a town I didn’t even know had a university to study philosophy and literature. The best thinky nuggets make it into my tiny notebook, which is superseded by sensibly larger versions so I can transcribe longer passages from the books, music, films, plays and poetry I’m now digesting.
The notebook-filling continues and a few years on, when another of my friends has a baby, I sit down and collect what I think might be all the best bits of life advice into one book as a ‘welcome-to-the-world’ present for the new arrival – starting with Emerson’s advice to “Be silly, be kind, be honest”.
I tell my dad what I made and he sends me a foxed and yellowed leather-bound notebook dated 1867 that he got at a car boot sale, with an illustrated floral frontispiece and filled with cursive snippets of copied-out text much like my own collections. A spot of Googling opens a rabbit hole of Victorian pastimes and introduces me to the concept of the ‘Commonplace book’ – a book into which extracts from proverbs, aphorisms, quotes, letters, poems and prayers are copied for personal use, particularly popular during the Renaissance and in the nineteenth century.
Long before the possibility of wasting the peace of a train journey by catching up with work emails or watching a film on a phone, Oscar Wilde’s advice to distraction-seeking travellers was to keep a diary, as “One should always have something sensational to read in the train”. For its part, my commonplace book has acted as a source of encouragement and a buffer against the often crushing realities of adulthood as the years marched on and life alternately carried me aloft and kicked me in the guts,
“Good judgement comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgement”, says Will Rogers, according to my notes. “There is no formula for success – you just begin and then you continue”, urges comedian Cameron Esposito. And Vivienne Westwood reassures me: “We can only try to be our best selves and do the best we can. Else why get up?”
After 34 years of self-selected note-taking my commonplace books have become a bespoke repository of bright advice from those long gone and still with us, who have no idea how much they have helped me. As Helen Macdonald puts it in ‘H is for Hawk’: “Hands are for other human hands to hold”.
A commonplace book is also a brilliantly ‘slow’ way of collecting and collating thoughts and interesting bits of stuff as an antidote to the doom scrolling that’s so easy to get sucked into these days. I note how Allan Jenkins, in his book ‘Morning – how to make time’, talks about limiting his time on social media as trying “to guard against bingeing on everyone else’s thoughts”.
For these reasons I highly recommend keeping a commonplace book. Copy out anything that strikes you as interesting or noteworthy at any given moment, and if you hate it later on, scratch it out – although I can pretty much guarantee that you won’t. As nature writer Richard Mabey says in another of my notes: “A ceaseless, gratuitous, inventive bodging is what keeps the world going”.
If you want to start your own commonplace book and need a meaningful (meta) motto to kick off with, you could do worse than this, from me: “Keep a commonplace book. One should always have something inspirational to read again and again”.
************************************************************************************************** Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash
This article first appeared in the July/August 2024 issue 97 of the Idler magazine
