'A Collection of Scraps and Shards of Knowledge'

“During this time we know [John] Donne was collecting his fascinations in a book: a collection of scraps and shards of knowledge known as a commonplace book.”

Like Donne (1572-1621), some of us are magpie-minded, collecting objects shiny and drab, often without obvious utility. Not physical objects. In that sense I’m among the least acquisitive of people, except when it comes to books. I refer to words used in memorable ways in books and magazines, and in movies, songs and conversation. My collection is democratic while remaining happily elitist.   

Years ago in cheap notebooks I began transcribing the words and sentences that caught my eye and ear. In 2006 I started Anecdotal Evidence and often drew on these notebook entries as raw material. I maintained no index and seldom dated the entries, so I've had to rely on a shaky memory. Fortunately, the blog comes with a search function. Anecdotal Evidence transcends the commonplace book by quoting from the accumulated passages and forming them into essay-like blog posts. I never wanted to be a mere quoter. My late friend D.G. Myers started his blog in 2008 and called it A Commonplace Blog.

The passage at the top is taken from Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022) by Katherine Rundell, who combines a biography of the poet with a critical approach and writes well. She tells us the fate of Donne’s commonplace book remains a mystery. The poet left it to his eldest son, who left it to Izaak Walton’s son, who left it to Salisbury Cathedral. There the trail stops. Rundell writes:

“If it is ever found, it will cause great and joyful chaos among the Donne community. Because, simply, Donne wouldn’t be Donne if he hadn’t lived in a commonplacing [the first time I’ve seen the word used as a verb] era; it nurtured his collector’s sensibility, hoarding images and authorities. He had a magpie mind obsessed with gathering. In his work, as Samuel Johnson said disapprovingly, you find  the ‘most heterogenous ideas are yoked  by violence together.’”

A misjudgment by Johnson, one of the most trustworthy critics in our tradition. Rundell continues:

“The practice of commonplacing – a way of seeking out and storing knowledge, so that you have multiple voices on a topic under a single heading – colours Donne’s work; one thought reaches out to another, across the barriers of tradition, and ends up somewhere fresh and strange. It’s telling that the first recorded use of the word ‘commonplacer’ in the Oxford English Dictionary is Donne’s.”

My most common commonplace sources, analog and digital, likely are Montaigne, Shakespeare, the King James Bible, Swift, Johnson, Nabokov and Guy Davenport.