It should be much easier to compile a Commonplace Book than writing a blog.
That is not the case. Jock Murray spent about sixty years jotting quotations in more than forty small notebooks. His son published extracts in 1996 as a tribute to him. Nigel Morgan’s collection is a more than respectable effort but a slim volume, showing what a prodigious amount of work is needed to create a Commonplace Book. This year Roger Hudson published his commonplace entries gathered over forty years and grouped under forty-six headings.
The compiler needs to be disciplined. Roger Hudson warns against too much high-brow content advising variety – “the unexpected are what you hope for, a bit of vulgarity and the ridiculous mixed in with the elevated”. Likewise the reader needs to be disciplined. Entries must be savoured, sipped like vintage port and enjoyed gradually. Here is an example from each book to whet your whistle. My only criteria is they are in chronological order and vaguely thematic..
We trained hard; but it seems that every time we were beginning to form into a team we would be reorganised. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganising, and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralisation. (Titus Petronius, gleaned by Jock Murray)
Reform, reform? Aren’t things bad enough already? (The Duke of Wellington, from Nigel Morgan’s Commonplace Book)
I feel we should not give him a post at this stage. Anything he undertakes he puts his heart and soul into. If there is going to be a war – and no one can say that there is not – we must keep him fresh to be our war Prime Minister. (Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin about Churchill in 1935, spotted by Roger Hudson)
I have not compiled a commonplace book, but if I were to do so I would certainly include these words of Lord Melbourne:
“What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass”.