This post is dedicated to those of you with unbeautiful notes!
When I published last week’s anniversary post, I worried that some might feel intimidated by so many gorgeous notes. Obviously, there is selection bias at play here: People with beautiful notes are more likely to share them.
This week, I’d like to formally declare that notes do not need to be beautiful. In fact, the history of commonplace books is rather visually bland. Most commonplace books I’ve seen are not aesthetic masterpieces. They were useful for their owners, and that was enough.
To celebrate notes that are not aesthetically pleasing, let’s consider two titles two of my favorite authors have used to describe their collections—titles that relish in the messy underbelly of creation.
A gentle reminder before we begin: This is the last day to take advantage of Noted’s anniversary sale. Paid subscribers get access to the commonplace book club and paywalled articles on the notes of people like Eminem, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Rachel Carson.
The Fly-Catcher
One of my all time favorite note-takers, the poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge depended on his notes. When he felt lonely and isolated from friends, he described his notebooks as his “sole companions.”
He also thought of them as places to catch stray ideas and hold them for trial. Thus, he titled some of his notes:
Fly Catcher: or
Day-Book for impounding Stray Thoughts…1
Another announces itself as a kind of legal cross-examination of ideas:
[A] Day-book for …. impounding stray thoughts and holding for Trial doubtful Thoughts.2
Coleridge used his commonplace books to write out quotations and test out his own ideas as they came to him. These were not polished thoughts—they were certainly not ready for publication.
Instead, he viewed his notebooks as sites of investigation.
Coleridge began titling his notebooks “Fly-Catchers” in the latter half of his life when he turned his attention to spiritual topics. Now, Coleridge copied out quotations from the mystic Archbishop Leighton and reflected on them.
In one of the early aphorisms in Coleridge’s spiritual masterpiece, Aids to Reflection, he writes:
To restore a common-place truth to its first uncommon lustre, you need only translate it into action. But to do this, you must have reflected on its truth.3
In other words, quotations—or commonplace sayings—become valuable when we apply them to our own life. And this is something we do not just by writing out quotes, but by reflecting on how they relate to our own particular lives.
In other words, we should use our commonplace books like fly-catchers—set to capture ideas for further examination.
The Quarry
When George Eliot wrote Middlemarch— “one of the few English novels written for grownup people," according to Virginia Woolf—she kept a notebook called a “Quarry”:
As a deep pit where precious natural resources (like gems or stones) are extracted, a quarry conveys the dusty mess and encasing rubble that one must sort through to get at the gems.
Here is a page from Eliot’s “Quarry.” It contains quotations from the medical journal, The Lancet. She used this information to create Lydgate, a doctor in the novel.
Previously, Eliot had used geologic metaphors to describe her mind in a particularly disordered state. I love this quotation from her letters:
I have lately led so unsettled a life, and have been so desultory in my employments, that my mind, never of the most highly organized genus, is more than usually chaotic, or, rather, it is like a stratum of conglomerated fragments, that shows here a jaw and rib of some ponderous quadruped, there a delicate alto-relievo of some fern-like plant, tiny shells and mysterious nondescripts incrusted and united with some unvaried and uninteresting but useful stone. My mind presents just such an assemblage of disjointed specimens of history, ancient and modern; scraps of poetry picked up from Shakespeare, Cowper, Wordsworth, and Milton; newspaper topics; morsels of Addison and Bacon, Latin verbs, geometry, entomology, and chemistry; reviews and metaphysics—all arrested and petrified and smothered by the fast-thickening every-day accession of actual events, relative anxieties, and household cares and vexations.4
Notes on Coleridge’s Fly-Catchers and Eliot’s Quarry
Even great authors struggled with their thoughts: Eliot’s letter (quoted above) reveals that she believed her mind tended towards disorder. For his part, Coleridge did not automatically trust his ideas. He needed to try them out in his notebooks first.
We all use our notebooks differently: I love metaphors for note-taking because they convey a range of relationships. While Coleridge saw his notes as a testing ground, Eliot viewed her notes as a pile of rubble filled with hidden gems.
Notes do not need to be beautiful: While Coleridge’s and Eliot’s notes aren’t necessarily ugly, they are not beautiful. They were not designed with an eye to aesthetics. Notebooks do not need to be pretty. In fact, some of the plainest notebooks I’ve seen are among history’s most influential.
For my part, I think of my commonplace books as bee hives—a swarm of ideas, perhaps a bit of a sting, but always with the promise of honey.
What about you? What metaphor describes your notebook practice?
Wishing you a wonderful start to the week,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Collected Notebooks 5:xlv n.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Collected Notebooks, 5:l, n.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Aids to Reflection in the Formation of a Manly Character on the Several Grounds of Prudence, Morality, and Religion: Illustrated by Select Passages from Our Elder Divines, Especially from Archbishop Leighton. Printed for Taylor and Hessey, 1825.
September, 14, 1839, The George Eliot Letters.
My notebooks are called FireWork — for the inner alchemical processes they document.
I’ve called mine a pensieve - a la Harry Potter: a place to store thoughts and memories to call up and reflect on later.