“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.
3 comments:
Rundell doesn't make much of it, but I've always got a kick out of the fact that Donne, Shakespeare and Robert Burton were alive and out and about at the same time, and could very well have met, or stood opposite one another waiting for traffic on the Strand. They might have passed each other in the middle of street, never knowing.
“Dubious memory “ is redundant.
I've no idea whose words predominate the entries into my own commonplace book (which I've made accessible through a link in my blog), but I do know that the tagline "quoted by Patrick Kurp at his blog ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE) occurs dozens upon dozens of times - and I thank you heartily for those delicious nuggets of thought that you've brought to your blog's readers over the many years you've been working at it.
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