Commonplace Book
Speaking of Susie Dent’s Guilty by Definition (we were speaking about this many days ago), the book introduced me to a new term: a commonplace book. This was a notebook where people collected thoughts, bits of poetry, recipes, ideas they liked, lists, etc.
Essentially a bullet journal. Or, at least, how I keep a bullet journal. I collect up tasks I don’t want to forget to do, dump out feelings, write down quotes from books or television shows, copy recipes, and record everything I am scared I will one day forget.
I also do the bullet journally thing of writing down a single sentence for every day of the year. I’ve been keeping a bullet journal since May 2014, so I have over 10 years of these one-sentence entries, and it makes me happy to flip through them and see what I thought on this day in a random year.
Oh! The point with Susie Dent’s book. There is a commonplace book in the book, and it made me think about how I shouldn’t destroy these journals at some point in the future. I mean, most of the scribbling will be meaningless to anyone but me, but then there are the pages that give a snapshot of the time vs. not just my mind.
The writings we leave behind keep popping up in books I’m reading. Maybe the universe is trying to send me a message.
1 comment
We never know what will be valuable to people in the future. A friend’s mother-in-law died, and they found all the diaries she had kept since she was a teenager. The national museum was absolutely thrilled to be given them, and they were accompanied by all the family photos too, so it was a real boon for the social historians. Such a valuable description of an everyday family. Your journals could be that too.