--Carsten Jensen, We, The Drowned
But tonight we danced with the drowned. And they were us.
--Carsten Jensen, We, The Drowned It is easier to be in love in a room with closed doors. To have the whole world in one room. One person. The universe condensed and intensified and burning, bright and alive and electric.
--Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea Everyone wants the stars. Everyone wishes to grasp that which exists out of reach. To hold the extraordinary in their hands and keep the remarkable in their pockets.
--Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea She smiled at him, making sure that the smile gathered up everything inside her and directed it toward him, making him a profound promise of herself for so little, for the beat of a response, the assurance of a complimentary vibration in him.
--F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is The Night It is almost never that I post my own words here, but the new year prompts an explanation of sorts, it feels like. What is The Common Place, and why do I bother?
A commonplace book is many things, different for each person who keeps one. Most generally, it's a place, usually a notebook (sometimes a blog) to keep ideas, thoughts, important bits and babs. Sort of a nest for the intellectual magpie. It differs from a diary or journal in that it is not a record (of chronology or introspection), but a collection of curated ideas. For years, I've collected quotes that I love, or can't get out of my head, or otherwise feel moved by here on this page. For many years prior to that, I've kept my own commonplace notebooks. I fill them with the words that I find inspiring, thought provoking, had wish I'd written myself. What's deemed important enough to record in a commonplace book depends its keeper. Carl Linneaus used his commonplace book to work out the nomenclature of things. John Locke thought the commonplace book was so important he wrote a treatise on how to keep one. Thoreau and Emerson kept them, as did Twain and Milton, Coleridge, Hardy, Woolf. The Common Place is the outward facing gallery of my own private collection, a series of quotes and ideas that perhaps might inspire others in the way they do me. You'll see repeats here--most definitely of writers and books, probably of certain quotations themselves (especially if you go poking into the archives). My only real criteria for inclusion is that I have read the novel, memoir, or other source material in full, and am in some way inspired by what I've found. I don't offer interpretation--that's up to you. So I begin this new year with a renewed commitment to my revamped version of The Common Place, and I hope you'll check back from time to time. And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been.
--Rainer Maria Rilke Winter then in its early and clear stages, was a purifying engine that ran unhindered over city and country, alerting the stars to sparkle violently and shower their silver light into the arms of bare upreaching trees. It was a mad and beautiful thing that scoured raw the souls of animals and man, driving them before it until they loved to run. And what it did to Northern forests can hardly be described, considering that it iced the branches of the sycamores on Chrystie Street and swept them back and forth until they rang like ranks of bells.
--Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale A boy at the beginning of a story has no way of knowing that the story has begun.
--Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea |
Alissa B.Nothing commonplace about The Common Place. Archives
December 2023
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