'A Record of Whatever Intrigues Him'

I’ve always been a hoarder not of objects but words. I may be the least acquisitive person you’ll ever meet outside of a monastery, but how I accumulate language. As a teenager I read that a fellow Ohioan, the poet Hart Crane, kept lists of words he liked for future use in poems. That seemed like an inspired idea and I did the same – not for poems, which I will never be able to write, but to savor and use on other appropriate occasions. A fellow reporter and I while working for a newspaper in Indiana used to challenge each other to work arcane words into our copy. Once I described a county commissioner as “freaming” a comment. The OED defines the verb “fream” as “to roar, rage, growl: spec. of a boar.” A frightened copy editor changed it to an anemic “said.” 

Later, without having ever heard of a commonplace book, I started saving whole passages from books, magazines and newspapers that amused me, were memorably well written or somehow suggested wisdom. All of this copying for years was strictly analog, transcribed into notebooks, until I and the rest of the world turned digital. Often, I realize, this salvage work is an end in itself. I have no index and rely on a slowly fraying memory. Preservation has become second nature. Howard Moss writes in “From a Notebook” (Whatever Is Moving, 1981):

 

“A commonplace book is a book in which someone keeps a record of whatever intrigues him – a passage found in a novel, a chance remark, a story snipped from a paper or a magazine. The entries can range from a recipe to an explanation of the universe. Being random and personal, a commonplace book has two major interests: the material itself, and a revelation of the person who selects it.”

 

Moss is writing about W.H. Auden’s A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (1970), which is more of an anthology of passages the poet prized and arranged alphabetically by subject. It doesn’t feel like a source book for Auden’s poetry and prose. Moss calls it “a very good small anthology of prose style.” I’m a linguistic magpie, gathering shiny bits of language because they please me, aurally or intellectually.