Notes as Collage: A Rumble of Thoughts

And a Celebration of the September Commonplace Book Club (CBC)

Reading through Whitman’s notes for last week’s post was by turns inspiring and nerve-wracking. I admire how he leaned into the mess, but I found myself unsettled by it. This is because one of the things I love most about keeping a notebook is the illusion of order. Even if thoughts in my mind haven’t settled and are buzzing around like Seneca’s bees, they can seem orderly when written in neat columns. Whitman, on the other hand, dispensed with all pretense. His thoughts sprawled and contradicted one another. So what?

Whitman didn’t have access to the term “collage”—he was decades ahead of Picasso, Braque, and Modernism—but he certainly understood the impulse behind it. So, Whitman invented his own language for it and described his scrapbook dictionary of American words as

Riffacciamento-rumble (sort of mosaic work mixture mess).¹

What a great phrase! It strikes me as a perfect description of Whitman’s notes. It also feels like a lovely way to think about notebooks in general—as a mixture of ideas and language, as a rumble of thought.

Studying Whitman’s notes during the final weeks of the September Commonplace Book Club (CBC), I couldn’t help noticing the parallels. Here we were—dozens of readers from all over the world posting quotes from our own notes on a shared thread. The juxtapositions were often delightful: a line of poetry, next to a photograph, next to a bit of philosophy. Out of this apparent jumble came unexpected patterns and harmonies.

In other words, our collective commonplace book became a perfect example of Riffacciamento—an Italian word that means recomposition, remaking, or a reworking.²

To celebrate our month of sharing quotes, I’ve assembled around 100 quotes gathered from September’s CBC!

I can’t wait for our club to reunite again in January!