Collecting Words, Slowly

Celebrating the June Commonplace Book Club

I’ve been a collector of words for as long as I can remember. I have little desire to collect anything else. There’s something deeply satisfying about transforming printed text into my own handwriting—about seeing a beloved author’s sentences take shape in my own notebook.

I’ve collected words singly—beautiful terms I want to remember and maybe use in my writing someday—and I’ve collected strings of words that end with a period. I’ve collected words that rhyme and paragraphs flooded with ellipses.

The financial cost of collecting words is low. Take a book out of the library. Write a favorite line in a cheap notebook. The cost in terms of time, though, is more significant. Writing out a quote by hand (as I do) takes a good deal of time. It requires a pause in reading.

Yet, pausing while reading can be extremely powerful—essential, even. To pause is to allow our minds time to digest ideas.

Keeping a commonplace book is not a practice that speeds up reading. Rather, it is a practice that slows it down. Collecting words, then, is a way to decelerate the reading experience.

In a world that feels quite fast-paced (even for this New Yorker), writing out sentences I’ve read and loved soothes me primarily because it runs counter to my usual practices. It makes me slow down. In the quiet of copying down another’s words, I acquire a bit of stillness.

Since we began the Commonplace Book Club (CBC) in September, I’ve written down quotes more consistently than ever before. This is different from the way I collect quotes while writing. The quotes I’ve transcribed for our club are purely personal. I collect them for fun, for my own edification. I collect them without concern for utility outside of my own commonplace book collection.

Over the past year many of you have joined me, and we’ve formed a true community of like-minded spirits. I’ve loved getting to know many of you through your entries. How lucky we are to have found so many people, scattered across the globe, who also love collecting words!