In Commonplaces

🗓 posted Apr 03, 2025 by Josh Erb
🔢 721 words
🏷

Something I've done since back before my undergraduate days is to reserve a small portion of my notebooks to act as a commonplace book. In practice this means, that I will write down citations and their sources chronologically as I come across them over the course of my daily life. The important thing about this is that it isn't centered around a theme or research topic. I'm not logging these things with any particular goal in mind, nor am I dating any of my entries. The only sense of timeliness is that I know what years, roughly, I spent using a particular notebook, and I know that the quotes are in chronological order. As a result, these pages become an ordered list of influences — poetry, good prose, essays, song lyrics, film or TV dialogue — as I have encountered them in my daily life.

I think that maybe in my old age, rather than write a memoir, I'll just dig into my personal archives and compile a full list of all these quotations that felt important to jot down. They reflect my quotidian life and the variety of things I've been exposed to and internalized more faithfully than my own hazy memories ever could. For now, though, they're a very useful tool for whenever I find myself in a creative rut. Something to leaf through and glance over and see what might cause a spark of creativity or insight.

Here are a few curated excerpts from my notebook that goes from 2022 to the present.[1]

Is that how we form our personalities, I've wondered. Besides the one we "lay" and display to the world, do we also carry in us some that are still developing? And when we write, do we somehow give birth to these embryos?

— Olga Tokarczuk, quoted in The Paris Review

[P]erhaps intelligence doesn't reside wholly inside the head or the machine, but somewhere in between — in the relationship between them.

— James Bridle; Ways of Being, p.31

What a silly and violent idea, to think that someone could leave the world, and in leaving could make a new one. Don't you know? You're always making the world you live in, friend, right up until the moment you die. And then after that, too.

— T Fleischmann; Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through, p.86

This is the light of autumn; it has turned on us.
Surely it is a privilege to approach the end
still believing in something.

— Louise Glück; Averno, p.10

But essentially the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.

— Susan Sontag; On Photography, p.57

America is a lie. Donald Trump is the truth.[2]

Graffito seen in the Shaw neighborhood of Washington, D.C. in September 2023

[W]hatever the degree of the accused's guilt, there has also been the spectacle of a terror by which all of us are threatened, that of being judged by a power which will hear only the language it lends us.

— Roland Barthes; Mythologies, p.52

All the eternal questions have become engineering problems.

— Meghan O'Gieblyn; God, Human, Animal, Machine, p.8

It's not the breakdown of our civilization that we're watching but its blossoming, greed and political corruption it's what America was built on [...] so it's not whether corruption's a sign of decay but whether it's built into things right from the beginning.

— William Gaddis; A Frolic of His Own, p.153

Nota bene: The above is not quoting from the notebooks verbatim by any means. I've greatly pruned the list as I pulled together this blog, a self-conscious act that is absent in the unselfconscious pages of my notebooks. Regardless, it is always an interesting activity to revisit these corners of my notebook and observe what has stayed with me, what strikes me differently after some time has passed, or what might have seeded a thought that germinating into something else in my own written output.

  1. Every non-journal notebook I use typically lasts me around 2.5 years. The one I'm currently using has been sitting next to me while I work since before my son was born.

<< all notes.