ONE Indispensable Tool for Writers, Useful for All Readers. . .

The Victorians called them “commonplace books,” and they were the “app” of their day — a place to capture and preserve highlights of books you’ve read.

You can see mine, perched up there on the nightside table. . .a little rectangular livre bought in Paris on a trip I promised myself after college. Its cover is made of Florentine paper and the book contains a collection of the most deeply felt, galvanizing words from decades of reading, time spent traversing countless imaginary landscapes — the reading, you might say, of a lifetime.

Here, writers and their words keep cozy company. These are passages that may be particularly well-written, or historic in way or another — but mostly they’re fragments that mean something to me. Something of the essence of that individual, his or her very center, has spoken out a deep truth.

So in my commonplace book, you might find a Buddhist koan rubbing shoulders with the likes of Dolly Parton or Joan Rivers. You’ll spy Rainer Maria Rilke hanging out with His Boys, Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud. Or you just might need to be very quiet when you come upon Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau sitting by the edge of a pond dabbling their toes, so as not to disturb their experience of transcendent Nature. . . .

Open my commonplace book and you find a patchwork of pencil, pen, highlighters, or red-blue-yellow-green-pink marker. There are index cards, sticky notes, tiny bits of newsprint affixed to pages with pieces of tape. There’s hurried scrawl and there’s careful calligraphy. On June 30th this year I’ve noted: “Interesting. . .I went to Paris the year after graduating from U of T (’84), so that means this little book is — 30 years old!” The thought amazes me. I’ve carried my little book with me through all my moves, and it always rests by my bedside. One day, no doubt, it will make a keepsake for. . .who knows?

If that doesn’t remind one that tempus fugits, then this last quotation, which graces the last page of my commonplace book, most certainly will. It’s Emerson:

Our fear of death is like our
fear that summer will be short,
but when we have had our swing
of pleasure, our fill of fruit, and
our swelter of heat, we say we
have had our day.