An online commonplace book
It was clear to Willie and to Jean that Mops was exceptional. She was the only girl who kept a commonplace book; they used to talk about “Mops and her Book of Quotes.”
If you didn’t already need a reason to commonplace. “Mops” gives you another; it automatically makes you exceptional 🙂
It’s details like these that keep me returning to biography so often.
Lee, Hermione. Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life. United States, Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. pg 38
Her consolations were the poetry she knew by heart, and the sound of the sea.
– Hermione Lee, on Penelope Fitzgerald attending the Deerhaddnn School
Homesick? Lonely? Overwhelm? Recite a poem you know by heart. This is the balm, the antidote. The consolation.
If you don’t have a few memorized, begin today. Add them to your quiver. The sound of the sea, if you can get near enough is a bonus.
Lee, Hermione. Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life. United States, Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. pg 35
Like that inaccessible landscape, her childhood rhyme sheets vanished, over time, into the distance. Later, she would collect others, and put them up on her own children’s walls, but all her life Fitzgerald regretted the loss of those first ones. In old age she wrote to a fellow enthusiast: “I’m perhaps the last person alive who used to go to sleep as a child with a coal fire and the PB rhyme sheets on the walls.”
It’s true you know. The images and words we hang on our walls remain inaccessible landscapes. Look at the art around you. The images, are they not portals to some glorious worlds? This doesn’t change as an adult. In adulthood one forgets.
Penelope Fitzgerald knew this.
Lee, Hermione. Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life. United States, Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. pg 31
I began to read just after I was four. The letters on the page suddenly gave in and admitted what they stood for.
– Penelope Fitzgerald
Some descriptions are well…FIRE. As read from Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life.
Lee, Hermione. Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life. United States, Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. pg 28
I am a biography nut myself. And I think when you’re trying to teach the great concepts that work, it helps to tie them into the lives and personalities of the people who developed them. I think you learn economics better if you make Adam Smith your friend.
– Charlie Munger
Second time this week an Adam Smith reference has found it’s way to me.
I need to make him my friend. First up The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
Munger, Charles T.. Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger. N.p., Stripe Matter Incorporated. pp37
Bath, inspiration in; Bible, knowledge of; critical spirit; Edwardian; emotion at war with intellect; family feeling; fearlessness; foreign travel, distrust of; games, love of inventing rules for; generosity; honesty; intellectual severity; love, need for; pipe speaking; poetry, love of; rhyming, skill at; speaking ability; temper, loss of; tender-heartedness; transport, passion for forms of (railways, trams, bicycles, motor-bikes); understatement, tendency to.
As read from Hermione Lee’s Penelope Fitzgerald, A Life
Writer Penelope Fitzgerald once wrote a biography on her father and his three brothers. Fathers and uncles aren’t the typical biographical portrait.
The structure of this index could be something to replicate. Quick notes on a new topic or city. Similar to Jack Kerouac’s sketches.
Lee, Hermione. Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life. United Kingdom, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2014. pg10
James Mill’s influence on John Stuart’s education is indefatigable. Here John describes how Plato, and the Socratic method helped him create a mental tool-box for clear thinking.
There is no other author to whom my father thought himself more indebted for his own mental culture, than Plato, or whom he more frequently recommended to young students. I can bear similar testimony in regard to myself. The Socratic method, of which the Platonic dialogues are the chief example, is unsurpassed as a discipline for correcting errors, and clearing up confusions incident to the intellectus sibi permissus, the understanding has made up all its bundles of associations under the guidance of popular phraseology.
James Mill was adamant about proper elocution. A lost oration skill today:
In going through Plato and Demosthenes, since I could now read these authors, as far as the language was concerned, with perfect ease, I was not required to construe them sentence by sentence, but to read them aloud to my father, answering questions when asked: but the particular attention which he paid to elocution (in which his own excellence was remarkable) made this reading aloud to him a most painful task. Of all things which he required me to do, there was none which I did so constantly ill, or in which he so perpetually lost his temper with me. He had thought much on the principles of the art of reading, especially the most neglected part of it, the inflections of the voice, or modulation as writers on elocution call it (in contrast with articulation on the one side, and expression on the other), and had reduced it to rules, grounded on the logical analysis of a sentence.
I sense James Mill would be furious with modern western educational curriculum. Outside of some particular schooling, or private tutors, elocution is an afterthought.
Extinct.
intellectus sibi permissus = the intellect left to itself
Mill, John Stuart. Autobiography. United Kingdom, Penguin Publishing Group, 1989.
To perfect the art of becoming such a reliable person, Franklin wrote out a “Plan for Future Conduct” during his eleven-week voyage back to Philadelphia. It would be the first of many personal credos that laid out pragmatic rules for success and made him the patron saint of self-improvement guides. He lamented that because he had never outlined a design for how he should conduct himself, his life so far had been somewhat confused. “Let me, therefore, make some resolutions, and some form of action, that, henceforth, I may live in all respects like a rational creature,” There were four rules:
- It is necessary for me to be extremely frugal for some time, till I have paid what I owe.
- To endeavor to speak truth in every instance; to give nobody expectations that are not likely to be answered, but aim at sincerity in every word and action–the most amiable excellence in a rational being.
- To apply myself industriously to whatever business I take in hand, and not divert my mind from my business by any foolish project of suddenly growing rich; for industry and patience are the surest means of plenty.
- I resolve to speak ill of no man whatever.
Happy Fourth of July!
If you were to write your own Plan for Future Conduct what would it be?
Four rules only!
Go.
From: Isaacson, Walter. Benjamin Franklin: An American Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004. (see pgs. 229-230)
I have sketched my house at Easton Pierse and marked with a cross my grandfather’s chamber where I was born. If it had been my fate to be wealthy man I would have rebuilt my house in the grandest of styles. I would have added formal gardens in the Italian mode of the kind I have seen at Sir John Danvers’s house in Chelsea and at his house in Lavington. It was Sir John who first taught us in England the way of Italian gardens. I would have erected a fountain like the one that I saw in Mr Bushell’s grotto at Enstone: Neptune standing on a scallop shell, his trident aimed at a rotating duck, perpetually chased by a spaniel. I would have carved my initials on a low curved bridge across the stream. I would have remade my beloved home in the shape of the most beautiful houses and gardens I have visited in my unsettled life, tumbling up and down in the world. But fate has taken on a different path and the house of my dreams is mere fantasy: a pretty sketch on paper.
Scurr, Ruth. John Aubrey: My Own Life. London: Vintage, 2015. pg 181
We should take these excerpts with some reservation. These aren’t John Aubrey’s copied diaries, but rather an original format historian Ruth Scurr uses to deploy John Aubrey’s biography.
John Aubrey is a man who knew what he wanted. We see this in the detailed descriptions of the gardens and fountains he dreamed of constructing:
I would have added formal gardens in the Italian mode of the kind I have seen at Sir John Danvers’s house in Chelsea and at his house in Lavington. It was Sir John who first taught us in England the way of Italian gardens. I would have erected a fountain like the one that I saw in Mr Bushell’s grotto at Enstone: Neptune standing on a scallop shell, his trident aimed at a rotating duck, perpetually chased by a spaniel. I would have carved my initials on a low curved bridge across the stream. I would have remade my beloved home in the shape of the most beautiful houses and gardens I have visited in my unsettled life, tumbling up and down in the world.
Scurr, Ruth. John Aubrey: My Own Life. London: Vintage, 2015. pg 181
John Aubrey was a man who embraced his fate. He accepts his fate twice in one paragraph. This was probably a more common character trait in the 1600s. In the modern west we’re taught to battle against our fate. We’re told anything is possible. That if we’re passionate, put our minds to it, we can bend our fate to be anything – yeah, yada, yeah. So when you hear someone admit their fate was not to be a wealthy man, and they accept that, it catches the ear.
If it had been my fate to be wealthy man I would have rebuilt my house in the grandest of styles.
and
But fate has taken on a different path and the house of my dreams is mere fantasy: a pretty sketch on paper.
Scurr, Ruth. John Aubrey: My Own Life. London: Vintage, 2015. pg 181
John Aubrey sketched! It’s not surprising. Photography was still two hundred years away, so people captured images by drawing. They preserved memories by drawing. They dreamed with their drawings:
I have sketched my house at Easton Pierse and marked with a cross my grandfather’s chamber where I was born.
and
But fate has taken on a different path and the house of my dreams is mere fantasy: a pretty sketch on paper.
Scurr, Ruth. John Aubrey: My Own Life. London: Vintage, 2015. pg 181
There’s so much to suss from this single passage!
Floodlights and Goalposts 