The following was written as a free-write on 11/10/2023 but I think does a good job of capturing how it feels to use a commonplace book these days.
The cover of my commonplace book (pic by me)
Keeping a commonplace book is helpful to record anything useful you stumble across, yet also a possible sign of intellectual masochism. Whenever I've started writing a blog, no matter how long I kept with it, it always started as a type of public online commonplace book. This is why I compile those "Interesting Things" posts with all the articles and videos when I can: it's a way to offload my YouTube and Pocket saves onto everyone else and keep them some place else so I can free up space to hoard more online ephemera. Like doing anything else online, though, this can only be satisfying for a period until it loses its charms and something else has to take it's place. Something physical can be a good replacement in these situations.
The book I use is just a cheap sketchbook I bought at Michael's around 2015 and tried to use for different purposes for the past eight years, filling out only a couple pages before ripping them out and tossing them into the trashcan to travel to the void. By the time I pulled it back out for this particular whim, I had already lost ten pages of the book and was certain this would happen again. Four [1] months in, I've already gotten about 30 pages filled so it seems this was the right use for the damn thing. Doubling it as a personal journal when flipped around didn't hurt either.
So why is it simultaneously helpful and "masochistic?" The book's function of holding various kinds of information - lists, diagrams, quotes, recipes - serves as a good way to catalogue all of the little things you come across while trying to learn or memorize them. Write it down or paste it in, read over it again, give it a date stamp, move on with your life. Forgot it? You know where it's at if you have to refer to it again. Essentially this is Scrapbooking for Pretentious Knobs. Despite that, it's been effective in retaining information while fun to read through for re-discovery (or ask "Why did I add that again?.."). That fun, though, is also where the downside starts to kick in and makes the process frustrating.
Examples of "info-dump" pages in the main part of my book (pics by me)
One is the sheer ugliness of how to keep the book. You could keep it clear with definite lines and rigid organization but that's not really the purpose of the commonplace book - that's a bullet journal. Bullet journals are all well and good but they also require precision and dedication. The commonplace book, though, is more for those of us with messier minds. It's hit-and-run journaling. You find something interesting, it goes into the book wherever it fits and has to be put in there ASAP or it gets lost in the shuffle. Bullet journals don't have much room for that. You set up the rules upfront and stick with them, otherwise everything gets screwed the moment you stray from them and it becomes hard to get back on track. This kind of journaling, though? You get to it when you get to it and it's flexible enough to be pulled out and dealt with on the fly. That spontaneousness is what leads to the ugly look of how the information gets stored. Lists on financial advice sit slanted next to abbreviated recipes for zucchini bread. A copy of Yeats's "The Second Coming" resides on the same page as a chart on beef cuts. Everything's all helter-skelter and if you're looking for structure or clear meaning, it'll just laugh in your face and tell you to piss off. The information is the meaning. Commonplace books don't care about anything else.
The other major problem comes with trying to figure out what goes into the book and what stays out. A lot of that depends on personal preference, of course, but the blank pages always bring temptation. The trouble I've gotten myself into lately with mine is wanting to paste/type a bunch of charts and forego actually writing anything by hand. In certain cases, this is fine: some information is better presented through visuals rather than through words. Writing things out by hand, though, is a key part of the memory retention and that's one of the biggest reasons to keep a commonplace book. If you stop doing that, a laziness comes over and you run the risk of no longer actually engaging with what's going in, only just hoarding stuff to hoard it.
As someone with life-long hoarding issues, there's danger in them there hills and the bad cycles just repeat themselves in a different way. Yet then the other side of this issue comes in: writing things down can be a pain, especially if you're getting to the point in your life that arthritis might be rearing its ugly head. Sometimes writing out a list of more than 15 things or a poem longer than a haiku hurts my hand and I begin wondering why I'm doing this. Reading them later and knowing when/where I was when it entered the book is certainly gratifying. Just not always sure if it's worth the hand cramps.
An example of personal "to-do" lists I keep on the flip-side of the book (pic by me)
While neither of these is helping making the case for commonplace books, there's one thing that essentially overrides them to note: it's still really fun to keep one. As someone who grew up enjoying encyclopedias and almanacs as fun reading material, doing this makes it feel like I'm finally living my childhood dream of creating my own desk reference. The dorky 10-year-old now gets to run wild almost 30 years later. As stupid as it sounds (and it does sound pretty stupid as I write this...), it's hard to give a self-conscious shit. I love it. It's a passion and a hobby, neither of which should feel shameful nor do they ever.
Other than what I wrote here, can I coherently explain why I love doing this? Hell no. I just do. That's good enough. And if you go into keeping one of these yourself with that mindset, it yields a fair amount of rewards as well. You discover new approaches to learning things. You develop a closer connection to the poems and recipes that go into it. Diagrams get more than a quick glance and are seen in a stronger critical way. The commonplace book becomes an extension of your intellectual and emotional thoughts and approaches, like an arm or leg of the mind.
(It also doesn't hurt that you have a repository to pilfer from, should you run out of ideas...)
Notes
[1] Almost six as of posting this on 12/29/2023 and about 50 pages total with something on them...