— RALPH WALDO EMERSONFor nearly four decades, I’ve kept what’s known as a commonplace book. It’s where I write down favorite sentences from novels, stories, poems and songs, from plays and movies, from overheard conversations. I began keeping my commonplace book in the 1980s, when I was in high school. Commonplace books are not so uncommon. The novelist David Markson wrote terse and enveloping novels that resembled commonplace books; they were bird’s nests of facts threaded with the author’s own subtle interjections.

Source: New York Times November 01, 2020 09:56 UTC