A reader named Tom wrote to ask how I organize my commonplace book, which is flattering and assumes facts not in evidence. But the question deserves an honest answer, so: here is the system, such as it is, after roughly twenty years and fourteen notebooks.
For anyone new to the term — a commonplace book is a notebook into which you copy passages from your reading. Not a journal (that’s your own life) and not a reading log (that’s bookkeeping). It is a private anthology: the sentences you refuse to let go of, written out by hand, in the order you met them. People have kept them for centuries. Milton kept one. Auden published his, which I consider cheating, because the whole dignity of the form is that no one is watching.
The received rules of commonplacing are three. One: always record the source. Two: organize by topic, with an index, so passages can be found again. Three: review regularly, so the collection stays alive in the mind. These rules are sensible, time-tested, and endorsed by four hundred years of serious practice.
I break all of them but one.
Sources: I record them when I remember, which is most of the time, in a slapdash citation format no style guide would recognize — “Woolf, diary, the vol. with the green spine.” There are passages in the early notebooks attributed to nothing at all, and I will tell you a secret: the unattributed ones are now the most interesting. There is a sentence in notebook four, copied out in my twenty-six-year-old handwriting, that reads, “What we call fate is the sum of the shortcuts we took to avoid deciding.” I have spent actual hours trying to find where that came from. Google has never heard of it. I have begun to suspect I wrote it myself, disguised it as a quotation because I didn’t yet believe I was allowed to say things, and copied it in. The commonplace book kept the secret for fifteen years and then handed it back to me as a question. No filing system delivers that.
Topics and indexes: no. I tried, in notebook six, which has an index page ruled with genuine hope. It lists three entries under A and then surrenders. The problem with organizing by topic is that it requires deciding what a passage is about at the moment you copy it, and the whole reason a passage stops you is that you don’t yet know what it’s about. The sentence about fate could be filed under Decision, Time, Regret, or Self-Deception, and choosing one would have amputated the other three. Chronological order — which is to say, no order — turns out to be the only honest scheme. The notebook is a record of what stopped me, in the order I was stoppable.
Review: rarely, and never on schedule. But this is the rule I keep, in my own way, because moving house or looking for something else keeps doing it for me. Every few years a notebook surfaces and I lose an evening to it, and the effect is always the same and always strange: the passages have rearranged themselves. Not literally — the ink stays put — but a passage copied at thirty for its wit turns out, at forty, to be about mortality, and was all along. The anthology holds still while the anthologist changes, which makes the commonplace book the most accurate autobiography I own. My journals record what I thought was happening. The commonplace books record what I was actually listening for.
So the system is: one notebook at a time, any notebook, cheap enough that I’m not afraid of it. Copy by hand, because the hand is slow and the slowness is the filter — if a passage isn’t worth the transcription, it wasn’t worth keeping. Date nothing, index nothing, reread by accident. Tom, I’m sorry. It isn’t advice. But it is, for whatever it’s worth, the truth.