The Beauty of Commonplace
| medium-archive | 181 words
TAGS: Medium archive
ORIGINAL: https://medium.com/@brennanbrown/the-beauty-of-commonplace-e91b9ba9bc2b
This is beyond the concept of a journal.
Commonplace books were essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: medical recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces were used by readers, writers, students, and scholars as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts they had learned. Each commonplace book was unique to its creator's particular interests.
The habit of journalizing becomes a life-long lesson in the art of composition, an informal schooling for authorship. And were the process of preparing their works for publication faithfully detailed by distinguished writers, it would appear how large were their indebtedness to their diary and commonplaces.
How carefully should we peruse Shakespeare's notes used in compiling his plays -- what was his, what another's -- showing how these were fashioned into the shapely whole we read, how Milton composed, Montaigne, Goethe: by what happy strokes of thought, flashes of wit, apt figures, fit quotations snatched from vast fields of learning, their rich pages were wrought forth! This were to give the keys of great authorship!