This newsletter is only possible because of paid subscribers. Will you upgrade to support the work I do here every week? It’s only $5 a month or $50 a year. Every subscription matters. I started a commonplace book a few weeks ago. I hadn’t heard of this very old practice until stumbling on a post about it recently, but commonplace books are meant to be a catalog of ideas and knowledge. You record choice quotes, poems, facts, or concepts—whatever you like—in a notebook and organize everything by theme. Virginia Woolf kept a commonplace book. So did Samuel Taylor Coleridge and W.H. Auden and a bunch of other folks. I loved the concept immediately. I have far too many books lying around my house with dog-eared pages and exclamation points in the margins, but I’ve had no way of collating it all, even though so much of it points toward a shared something. With a commonplace book, all those dog-eared pages and exclamation points can coexist on the same page. All these different writers can be read in conversation. It’s simple (unless you want to follow John Locke’s overly-involved system for keeping one): any time you’re inspired to jot something down, you consider its theme. Throughout the notebook, you title pages with these themes, adding new ones as you go. Gradually, you build an index at the front of the notebook with page-number references. It ends up being a primary catalog of your obsessions. I love obsessions. I am obsessed with obsessions. I want to know everyone’s obsessions. So far, my index includes:
Then there’s a whole Spirituality section, with more sub-topics than I will actually share because I’m still kind of stupidly bashful about this area of interest:
I would appreciate having an index of my obsessions at any time, but right now it feels like a lifeline. A sign of life. In the midst of so much cruelty and hatred—so much anti-intellectualism—that index feels like a reminder of those things I want to hold onto: passion, curiosity, inspiration, and connection. I want to sit with all my books. I want to collect all the world’s beauty and wisdom. On a less virtuous tip, a commonplace book is a perfect hobby to take up as you’re trying to finish edits on a book. Yes, yes, I’ll get to that re-write, but first lemme just try to get a handle on the concept of non-being real quick. I figure you probably don’t need another hot take right now, but maybe you could use a reminder of your passions or a distraction technique (if so, Austin Kleon has an in-depth primer on keeping a commonplace book). I leave you with a few things I jotted down this week. Presence
Desire
Time
Want Me
Masculinity
Writing
Beauty
Absence/Emptiness
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četvrtak, 23. siječnja 2025.
A catalog of obsessions
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