An online commonplace book
“Draw, Antonio, draw, Antonio, draw and do not waste time.”
– Michelangelo
Or write. Or code. Or pitch. Or read. Or blog.
Do not waste time.
Oliver, Henry. Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life. United Kingdom, John Murray Press, 2024. pg 278 of the Kindle Edition
A photograph is easily printed and reproduced and shared on social media. A drawing, on the other hand, is a more deliberate act. It slows me down. I do it in order to slow-jam the news.
Kumar, Amitava. The Blue Book: A Writer’s Journal. India, HarperCollins Publishers India, 2022. pg 76
Doodling here is writing’s other self, its shadow form. As much as they tell us about writing, doodles tell us about reading. They get at the heart of the critical act by seeming to solicit interpretation, then skittering away when we get down to the business of studying them. They might, after all, register no more than the inky imprints of the pleasures of mark-making or the necessity of testing the pen. Take a doodle too seriously, and you risk finding only your own desire for meaning bounced back at you.
Draw.
Polly Dickson, “Doodle Nation: Notes on Distracted Drawing,” The Paris Review (blog), July 17, 2024, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2024/07/17/doodle-nation-notes-on-distracted-drawing/.
He was a man of immensely strong faith. A faith that balanced well with his reason.
Malcolm Guite on Dr. Johnson
What a large volume of adventures may be grasped within this little span of life by him who interests his heart in everything.
McCullough, David. John Adams. United Kingdom, Simon & Schuster, 2001. pg 287
Thanks to Madame Lafayette, they were seated in a gallery overlooking the choir, “as good a place as any in the church,” thought John Quincy, who in a long description of the spectacle in his diary demonstrated that besides being precociously erudite, he had learned, as his father urged, to observe the world around him and was well started on becoming an accomplished writer. He described the Parliament lined up to the right side of the choir, robed in scarlet and black, the Chambre des Comptes on the left, in robes of black and white; the bishops arriving two by two, “a purple kind of mantle over their shoulders,” the Archbishop of Paris, “a mitre upon his head,” and finally the arrival of the King.
John Quincy Adams heeding his father’s advice to observe the world around him.
Or as Teju Cole begs: observe, observe, observe.
McCullough, David. John Adams. United Kingdom, Simon & Schuster, 2001. pg 327
“Being interested is what is scarce.”
– Tyler Cowen
I’ve listened to this podcast 5, 6 times, pulling out a new insight from each listen. It’s an excellent primer on John Stuart Mill.
Start with Autobiography. It will get you interested. And listen to the podcast in full here.
“Reading John Stuart Mill.” The Common Reader (podcast), featuring Tyler Cowen, hosted by Henry Oliver, December 11, 2023. https://www.commonreader.co.uk/p/tyler-cowen-reading-john-stuart-mill.
The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.
– Samuel Johnson, RAMBLER, No. 2
Johnson, Samuel. Samuel Johnson: Selected Works (The Yale Edition). Edited by Howard D. Weinbrot and Robert DeMaria Jr., Yale University Press, 2020 pg. 9
Write early in the morning, cultivate memory, reread core books, take detailed reading notes, work on several projects at once, maintain a thick archive, rotate crops, take a weekly Sabbath, go to bed at the same time, exercise so hard you can’t think during it, talk to different kinds of people including the very young and very old, take words and their histories seriously (i.e., read dictionaries), step outside of the empire of the English language regularly, look for vocabulary from other fields, love the basic, keep your antennae tuned, and seek out contexts of understanding quickly (i.e., use guides, encyclopedias, and Wikipedia without guilt).”
I’d add Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Perplexity.ai to without guilt list.
H/T Austin Kleon
Hanrahan, Brían. “The Anthropoid Condition: An Interview with John Durham Peters.” Los Angeles Review of Books, July 10, 2015. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-anthropoid-condition-an-interview-with-john-durham-peters/.
It holds a personal memory for me; for, back in the 1970s, my father took me to see my first ever test match there. I loved everything about it: the excitement of the day out, the presence of a crowd gathering with rising expectation, all intent on one thing: the match itself, with the lightning excitement of each ball played, set within the longer and more leisurely rhythm of overs and innings. But what I most remember, looking back, what set the day apart, was that for the entire day I saw my father completely happy.
– Malcom Guite, on the Oval
Seeing your father completely happy is a rare thing. One that should always be documented.
Perfect timing from Malcom’s Poet’s Corner with the US upsetting Pakistan in the Cricket T20 World Cup.
Guite, Malcolm. “Poet’s Corner.” Church Times, 31 May 2024, https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2024/31-may/comment/columnists/malcolm-guite-poet-s-corner. Accessed 9 June 2024.
Floodlights and Goalposts 