On Keeping a Commonplace Book

For about ten years I have kept a notebook that is not a journal. It does not record what I did or how I felt about it. It records only sentences I did not write — lines from books, overheard remarks, the occasional menu — copied out by hand because I wanted to slow down enough to own them for a moment.

The old word for this is a commonplace book, and it is one of the few inheritances from the past that has only gotten more useful. In an age that offers to remember everything for me, the act of choosing what to write down by hand is the whole exercise. The friction is the feature. A sentence I bookmark, I forget. A sentence I copy, I keep.

The strange reward is that the book slowly becomes a portrait of you, assembled entirely out of other people’s words. You did not write a line of it. It could not have been written by anyone else.