An online commonplace book
I would rather read the 1545 Bible translation of Martin Luther than any of the German Romantics, and who can walk past Joseph Conrad’s short stories or Hemingway’s first forty-nine stories — especially “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” — without experiencing something phenomenal?
– Werner Herzog
Cronin, Paul. Werner Herzog – A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Faber & Faber, 2020. pp144
If I were caught on a desert island, without a doubt I would want all twenty volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary to keep me company. Such an incredible achievement of human ingenuity, one of the greatest cultural monuments the human race has created. Thousands of scholars have contributed to it over one hundred and fifty years.
– Werner Herzog
Werner’s birthday was this week. Reference books are underrated.
Cronin, Paul. Werner Herzog – A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Faber & Faber, 2020. pp144
What Emerson kept, and what he recommended enthusiastically to others, were what used to be called commonplace books, blank bound volumes in which one writes down vivid images, great descriptions, striking turns of phrase, ideas, high points from one’s life and reading — things one wants to remember and hold on to. A commonplace book is not a diary, an appointment calendar, or a record of one’s feelings. If your journal consists of the best moments of your life and reading, then rereading it will be like walking a high mountain trail that goes from peak to peak without the intervening descent into the trough of routine. Just reading in such a journal of high points will tighten your strings and raise your pitch
– Robert D. Richardson
This is the aim of Floodlights and Goalposts. I hope its a high mountain trail that goes from peak to peak.
If you’re keeping a commonplace book, which I hope you are, or any notebook, be sure to go back and re-read what you’ve captured.
Richardson, Robert D.. First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process. United States, University of Iowa Press, 2015.
Though I urge possession-by-memory of poems, through repeated readings, I suspect that reading aloud is also a valid test for poetry and fictional prose alike. Reciting a bad poem is a distressing experience, reading aloud a poor story is scarcely better. But it can be astonishing how an excellent story or poem suddenly expands into a cosmos of absolute illumination when one listens to its recitation. I remember then that the Homeric epics were chanted aloud to audiences, and that Geoffrey Chaucer wrote in order to read his work at the royal court and in the house of the great nobles.
– Harold Bloom
How can you tell if your story or poem has potential? Read it aloud to your self.
Do you cringe?
Are you distressed?
Bloom, Harold. Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages. United States, Scribner, 2002.
“Go and do your duty; and be hanged, if you must, like a gentleman. There are worst things in the world than to be hanged.”
– Lawyer
Go and do your duty today, despite the pain.
Make yourself proud.
Stevenson, Robert Louis. Kidnapped. New York: Running Press, 1989. pp286
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.
Nothing is so real to me as the illusions I create with my painting. The rest is shifting sand.
— Eugène Delacroix
Grant, R. G., et al. Remarkable Diaries: The World’s Greatest Diaries, Journals, Notebooks, & Letters. United States, DK, 2020.
The ferisher baseball lay warm and almost animate, a living thing, in his fingers, he recalled Peavine’s words: “A baseball game is nothing but a great slow contraption for getting you to pay attention to the cadence of a summer day.”
Or a November evening.
For the Rangers, World Series Champions.
Chabon, Michael. Summerland: A Novel. New York: Hyperion Books for Children, 2002. (pp332)
Joseph Roth is a master of writing images and crafting metaphors. They are true, surprising, and specific.
Consider the following passages:
He observed the immense shadows cast by small objects on the bare blue walls; the gently curved shimmering outline of his sword hanging from its hook by the door, its dark ribbon tucked into the hilt. He listened to the ceaseless rain outside drumming on leaded window frames; and rose at last, having decided to go and see his father the following week,
and
He found the old gentleman in his shirtsleeves sitting in the kitchen of his quarters at a plain deal table covered with a dark-blue cloth edged in scarlet, a large cup of steaming, fragrant coffee in front of him.
This one he repeats:
His consonants rumbled like thunderbolts, the final syllables laden with small weights.
and
“shaking him as a hurricane shakes a feeble shrub”
From:
Roth, Joseph. “The Hero of Solferino.” Leadership: Essential Writings by Our Greatest Thinkers (Norton Anthology), edited by Elizabeth D. Samet, W. W. Norton & Company, 2015, pp. 69-82.
Floodlights and Goalposts 