Hi, and welcome to Classical Stuff You Should Know, a podcast about the classical world, classical education, put on by some guys who work at a classical school in Austin, Texas. My name is Graham Donaldson, and I am here with A.J. Hanenberg and Thomas Magby. And gentlemen, as I take stock of my life, I ask myself a question.
Do Thomas and A.J. still spark joy in my heart? And I've determined that no, people will be sacrificed to the whole game of us. No, I'm just kidding.
As long as he brings rain. Apparently we're talking about Marie Kondo today. This is the rumors I've heard that we are going to be talking about organizing our lives and whether or not things modern class is. Have you read this book before?
Nope. It's the life-changing magic of tidying up. Seriously? I don't understand.
We're such a trendy podcast. Although we're like four months behind. No, no, years behind. We've been looking at it a long time ago.
Okay, so you all have... Is it classical yet? Is it like four years? No, four than six months makes it a classic, right?
I'm pretty sure. Okay. I'm sure you've heard of this before. Today's 24 hours.
Am I right? Six months is classic. It's ancient. Do you all know anything about this book?
It is an adorable Japanese woman who goes to people's houses and organizes them meticulously. There's a Netflix show. I watched one episode and it stressed me out. I think the first episode?
Why did it stress you out? It was like orders. Yes, so you stressed you out how much stuff that you had. But they get rid of a bunch of stuff.
They do. But it's also just like made me think about how much stuff are in how many people's houses and then all this stuff. And I just got like... I felt the world choking.
It was more like consumerism stressed out. But anyway. That's fair. I think there's now like a comic book version of this.
So they adapted into that. So it's kind of a big deal. No more than your time's bestseller. So it's kind of a big deal book.
Okay. So I'm going to show that she has become a verb. To Marie Kondo. Kamari is this.
I know she's got her own verb. But people call it Kondo-ing, which is also really kind of stupid because she invented her own word to talk about this. Kamari is anyway. That's weird.
So, Graham, you just kind of made a joke about this. But if you were to summarize the message of this book, I guess you haven't read it. But you have the core idea of it. What is this book about?
It takes stock of all the things that you have and put it through this simple test. And the simple test is, I don't think, all that simple. It doesn't spark like joy. It doesn't give you some sort of emotional reaction of, I want this.
And if it does, you keep it. And if you don't, you ruthlessly execute it for your life. So early on in the book, she says that the purpose of the process is that we should be choosing what we want to keep, not what we want to get rid of. Which is an interesting question to start with.
Yes. And then you describe this. The process is to take each item in one's hand and ask, does this spark joy? If it does, keep it.
If not, dispose of it. What do you all think about this other process? Fine. I mean, what about tools?
Yeah. So I guess people are troubled discarding things that they could still use, which have a functional value, that contain helpful information, informational value, and that has some mental ties, emotional value. When these things are hard to obtain or replace, they become even harder to part with. so tools are kind of that funny category of do you actually need them like how often do you use those tools well for example the laptop I'm using right now I use for DJing and for podcasts I'm not overflowing with joy every time I look at this laptop but if I ditch this a lot of the things that do bring you joy would be gone interesting so then the laptop would do that or maybe you should get a better laptop I have a laptop that's nicer but it's harder to transport I guess yeah so that's the point the point is like finding things that you really like and sticking around is the point like to try to apply that rubric at the front end so you don't accumulate or can you only learn if something brings you joy by having it for a while and so accumulate stuff but then you have no idea if this is going to fit your criteria so live with it for a year and then you can go through the process of getting rid of it so most people come to this having a bunch of junk that's why they're reading a book about throwing things away and so the goal is to figure out what you want to keep and then to have that in mind when you're making purchases later so don't talk about holding off on purchases it's basically as you've heard before but don't mind wait 24 hours wait a week before making any major purchase and think about whether you actually want to hold on to this thing so the process is kind of where we're ending up with this so there are all these different categories you're supposed to go through to find out what you want to throw away so you start with clothes you move on to books you move on to papers you move on to miscellany and then you move on to sentimental value sentimental items at the very end and the idea is to start with things that are easier to throw away and move to things that are harder to throw away so here's the basic line of what stuck out to me in reading through this book this is a long time ago Graham has talked before about how eventually we're moving out to a bunch of land out in south of Austin west of Austin and so part of what we needed to do was clear through our stuff and we needed a way to systematically do that so we found the book helpful but here's the line and this is why we're talking about this book so again the second step is to get rid of books so she talks about this process of how she picked which books to get rid of so realizing that what I really wanted to keep was not the book but certain information or specific words it contained I decided that if I kept only what was necessary I should be able to part with the rest my idea was to copy the sentences that inspired me into a notebook over time I thought this would become a personal collection of my favorite words of wisdom it might be fun to read it over in the future and trace the path my interest had led me with great excitement I pulled out a notebook I liked and launched my project I began by underlining the places I wanted to copy then I wrote the title of my notebook and began transcribing once I started however I realized that this process was far too much work it takes time to transcribe and if I was going to be able to read those words in the future my handwriting had to be neat to copy 10 quotations from a single book would take at least half an hour and that was a low estimate the thought of doing this for 40 books made me dizzy she talks about trying to use a copy machine and how that didn't work then ultimately she realizes that she never actually goes back and reads these quotes so she abandons her project altogether and then only keeps I forget if she specifies this but basically keeps one book at a time she's only ever reading one book at a time well gentlemen you don't need the other books you're not going to read them right is this not how you use books no wait what do you mean that sounds a pain coming from you right now I mean I guess I guess I'm an educator so it's a little bit different but I reference books constantly in class and I'll pull them off and read quotes and include quotes and you know tests and stuff I want to do in class I was going to say she's not an educator I mean that she does not teach formally in a classroom she does train people on how to be organized but maybe she doesn't need how long has it been since you read The Word of the Flies gosh 10 years at least what do you remember from that book I remember A Glass of Ball Shattering and The Guy Who Dies is that a spoiler I remember my feeling of dread at reading it that glass ball was actually a white conch shell and not a glass ball so like even details are gone and that means that if you had these great lessons that I mean that's what the problem is the madness of this anarchic society that's the problem with human memory is I can read a book and feel like I've gleaned the lessons from it but those lessons will so I kind of think it like being baked in so it'll get baked into me but over time kind of like a tattoo like that tattoo will get blurry and the thing baked in will maybe lose meaning and I'll lose a little bit of definition and perhaps over time the lesson will get overlaid with other lessons and other tattoos will cover it up and it's not fresh anymore that's just how human memory works you're just going to forget it becomes a glass ball instead of a white conch shell and you have to be able to save that off by rereading which means going back to a book and having marginalia so I can find things in the book quickly and being able to reference them and commonplace my commonplace book is a huge reference I ascribe to Nassim Taleb's his view of the library where in the library you have lots of books that you haven't read like my library has tons of books that I've never read and they sit there judging me they sit there looking at me and every time that you see the library there is the aspiration to read them but then there's also that reminder that I do not have everything I have not read everything I do not have the capacity to read everything and so there's a bit of not only like a spurring on that a shelf full of books I'm looking at AJ's shelf of books in his classroom right now there are books in there that I'm like oh I've always wanted to read that and the fact that I haven't or don't reminds me of my capacities and should force me some sort of humility and then also in those moments where I'm looking for something to read I haven't pulled down and I can begin so I feel like there's that condo method or her eliminating these books for the sort of the inner peace that a clean space brings is not as good it is a good thing but it is not as good as having the shelf full of books that you want to read that has no books in it that has no bookshelf in it I think he's onto something I mean what if you go to a party and there's no bookshelf what do you guys do?
I don't know what to do I usually want to go and peek at their bookshelf sometimes I'll stand there reading a book in the party when you go to a party you should befriend their pets so much we should befriend them to the point where the pet wants you to be their master that's just a game you can play if you're bored at a party apparently we all hate going to parties because none of us have mentioned I don't know talking to people at this party make that pet question their loyalties I need to know everything about my host's vent and you can learn that from their bookshelf so I can look at their shelf and then be like oh okay well we're not going to have any conversations we're going to leave the party early that's funny we're not talking about the life of any magic and tidying up so just what blows my mind is that this passage is a book that sold I don't know I think over 2 million copies again number one bestseller for months and months and months and not years a big deal a big modern culture deal book includes this idea of keeping any of the knowledge of the things you read is essentially a waste of time that you're better off sure you can read for entertainment but get rid of the book afterwards because you're never going to look at that stuff again that's just a super bummer thing that we're going to launch off into of how do we actually hold on to that knowledge of what we read so again I'm misremembering details from books I've read before that I would say confidently oh no I know this but I don't actually so one of the you all have referenced this already one of the ways to do that is a thing that's called a commonplace book that's a weird name so let's start there what is this book AJ you just referenced it and Graham you haven't talked on this before but what is this thing you call a commonplace book you haven't talked to that you haven't talked to that so a commonplace book is a book that you write quotes in from other books and you keep them and compile them in that book because your memory is not going to retain these sorts of things and it's not just facts but it's meaningful pieces from the book and then it gives you a discipline to your reading so you're not just reading and putting down and never remembering but for me at least whenever I keep a commonplace book and whenever I have to give a talk or if someone asks me something about a specific topic and I'm like oh man I know I remember having opinions on this five months ago when I was reading After Virtue or whatever and After Virtue is hard I'm reading right now it is such a hard book and the amount of focus it requires to go through this book is high but there's such good stuff in there that I know that when I'm done if I don't keep some sort of method of synthesizing what I've read into some sort of output a commonplace book where the conclusions that I have or the marginalia if I can sort of reproduce it in some sort of way I'm going to forget what I read of a very difficult book in a year from now so it's kind of like there's so many different ways to do it you need to develop a method where you're basically taking the things that you read and turning them into some kind of artifact and Thomas asked us to bring our so I've got mine sitting in front of me mine is a shoebox filled with hundreds and hundreds if not thousands of index cards with quotes written on them and I've categorized them in terms of different categories and so not only does it force me to try to synthesize what I'm reading into good takeaways it's more like when I flip through the cards it sparks my memory which I would not necessarily have unprompted because I can't keep everything so I sort of think of it as like an external hard drive of my brain like I can't keep everything that I read about like for example in the last podcast I gave a quote from Epictetus about sheep and wool and I have a note card so you can hear it I have a note card in my hand of that exact quote because I know the gist of it but the way that he phrases it is better than I can remember it and I haven't remembered it so having it as a note card and the thing is I may well forget it so I have these note cards and I flip through them every couple of months and I'm like oh yeah and that may spark something that I'm reading now that I can bring into my teaching so it's basically just like creating a system for yourself at least that's how I've used the commonplace book how long does it take you how long do you think can you put together that true box years I mean what I have done and I stopped doing in fact full disclosure I don't think I've added a new note in maybe probably 10 months so I'm almost a holy calendar year without adding a new note but what I used to do and what I was really disciplined at and what produced a lot of material was our church is on Sunday Sunday afternoons and we get home around 6 and we have dinner and then we're kind of like getting ready for the school year or for the week the work week ahead I will do Sunday nights I will sit and I will go through the things that I've read and I will write out I will go into the things that I've underlined and then I will write them on note cards and then I will put them into some sort of category oh I said I haven't been doing this in 10 months that's not true I have a bunch of things from Black Swan in here that I read maybe there's a gap is what you're saying so you did Black Swan but maybe they were six months before yeah yeah yeah I think I read Black Swan like last Christmas anyway so then I create these note cards and then I try to get them categories that they go under so that I can organize them but Thomas was making fun of my categories earlier because I was looking for a note and I couldn't find it because my categories are not super helpful I don't really know because I'm sort of like I'm making it up as I go along so we'll come to this later of what do your commonplace books look like that's the one topic and then after that how do you then use them but Graham's already said all of this that commonplace is a weird word because I hear commonplace and I think like every day it's a commonplace occurrence that happens every day but the word is referencing more the topics themselves that there are general topics that are in like that's literally what commonplace is referencing there are these general topics that you are reading about studying and you are collecting information on those general topics and so the purpose of the book you can use it for whatever you want to I think of one of the purposes as to organize the information that you're receiving and so here's what one author says about a thing here's what another author says about that same topic and you collect them in that way is that fair? I think that's a thing that is typical of commonplace books and especially books that you enjoy but don't necessarily immediately fit into the things that you're currently thinking about so for example Thomas Yu years ago lent me The Intellectual Life is that what it's called and how long did I have it for? Years I had it for like two years and I read it in fits and spurts but for whatever reason the book just never like really grabbed hold of my thought life but every time I read it I came away with something interesting and I do have a lot of notes from that book in my commonplace book but it didn't immediately fit into whatever I was reading whatever I was thinking about right now so it took a long time for me to read it but I now have these notes and I'm probably not going to read it again and I now have these notes that maybe one day are going to be little keys that unlock something else or they're going to fit into something you know so I kind of see it as like it's a contingency plan for something that doesn't really make sense or it doesn't really fit into what you're thinking about right now because I'm remembering when I read The Intellectual Life and Graham can attest to it based on the underlining I underlined almost every other sentence in the first third book because you were devouring for whatever reason but then in the back two thirds I felt like I was doing a disservice to the book by you know if you highlight everything you haven't really filtered it at all and so we just you know what I mean we just collected different things from the same book and that's what this kind of relates to our catechism discussion last time that you're going to draw something different from a book than the same person reading that same book that's fine you should return to those books anyway whereas when you guys talk about that book like if you underline everything I have a rule that I'm not allowed to include anything from Dorian Gray in my commonplace book because it would really just be like the whole thing if the writing is so good there's so many turns of phrase it would take me hours and hours and instead I just keep the book of Dorian Gray and that's my commonplace for Dorian Gray and that's a great point I'm focused what I just said was I focus on the ideas and so there's an interesting idea I want to collect that and kind of group them together AJ I think you focus maybe more for sure more than I do on like the beauty of the language itself as a thing to collect also it's certainly an element I have a lot that are ideas and I have some that are simply there for a nice turn of phrase is that just a different category for you? the way I categorize is different than the way Graham does yeah I've tried to adopt AJ's categorization of phrases of like just writing that I like and I'm trying to collect so if you go in my marginalia of any book that I read if you see something that says in the margin WL that means that I've underlined it with an I for adding it to something that I would show in my writing lab at school because here is just the way that the sentence was turned or the way that the phrase happened was a good example of good writing and so I was reading this weekend this just happened I was reading I'm reading Shelby Foote's history of the civil war and I just started the second volume and there's this one paragraph where they're talking about a specific short confederate general who wore like flouncy shirts and was quite sort of dandy-ish in his appearance and it had this great phrase where he talked about he always got what he wanted and when he was young he wanted a brick house a seat in congress and the specific girl and then it said that and it talked about how here's a fun one this is on dr.
Hirsch's bulbous head it's by Chesterton in his other ground series the door was opened to them by the doctor's old servant Simon who might have passed for a doctor himself having a strict suit of black spectacles gray hair in a confidential manner in fact he was a more presentable man of science than his master dr. Hirsch who was a forked radish of a fellow with just enough bulb of a head to make his body insignificant just a fabulous fun little phrase so just to say again so a common place literally just means they're general topics that you're organizing these quotes around then the book part is also I think a loose interpretation of what a book is so Graham has said he uses a no card system I also use a no card system and a digital no card system yes sir so none of us are using an actual book I did for a long time and if you google commonplace book most often what you see are actual books Lewis Carroll has a really cool one that pops up usually so or I mean like meditations Marcus Aurelius like that he's writing in a journal and that's what's published eventually in meditations so usually you'll find books I mean it has to be a book especially with the internet and PCs like there are lots of really interesting electronic options so that's kind of what a commonplace book is so can we talk about what our commonplace books look like sure AJ do you want to start yeah I originally had a book and what I found was that if I wanted to go back and find a particular quote it took me forever and it was painstakingly difficult to transcribe just as the lady said writing my hand takes a long time so what I do is as I read if I find something I like if I don't have my commonplace book handy I usually do it's digital but I will underline it or bracket it and put CPB next to it commonplace book and then later once I finish the book I'll go back through and I'll transcribe all of my CPB spots and I cross it out once I've done it so if I'm reading through a book and I find a CPB that hasn't been crossed out I know that I still have to enter that at some point so the way I enter it is I actually do mine on Evernote so Evernote if you're listening and you like to send me some free swag or something you know I'm waiting but it's a fantastic little program so it's a free program I don't pay for premium you can have it on I think it's like three devices anyway so my phone and two laptops is more than enough and even if you don't have all the program you can get it free online like a website there you can upload if you pay for premium which when I was heavily using Evernote was really helpful but for most people and I'm not including any pictures or videos so if you're just doing text you can upload an insane amount of quote stuff so I enter the title of my quote I enter my quote and then I think one of the reasons I really love this is that I can divide these into notebooks so every notebook is a different book or novel and so all of my quotes from that book are in that notebook so I can just scroll down all the authors I've read find a book that I like and see all the quotes from that book and then the other thing is that every time I enter a note I give it tags so if it's on I don't know fear and pain and the modern man I'll put fear pain modern modern man and that way later if I'm doing a talk or presenting something then I can search my tags and every quote that has to do with money or beer or whatever well I have beer tags and so I can bring up all those things and it saves me all the time of having to search all the way back through my gazillion quotes it's a little bit of a bummer because I don't have a chronological record of my thinking reading but I do get a list of all the books that I've read and then notes from all those also when you put them in yeah yes so you actually can get a note of that yeah I can't recommend it more highly provided that you do it in that way that you're putting them in the already and you read them but you know so I've got on my phone and my laptop and I use it for school all the time we do I mentioned a few podcasts ago that when I open class we have a quote response most of those are pulled directly from my oh that's cool I haven't thought about that so then do you react like you get to tell the kids then like this is my reaction this is why I included it in my yeah and some of them are fun and some of them are thoughtsy and I get to tell them why I chose it thoughtsy yeah English teacher over here yeah thoughtsy what's thoughtsy it's exactly what sounds man welcome to English it's really Englishy Englishish and something I hadn't thought of until you said that is so for Graham and I use a paper system and so I have a limited number of categories I got to make a new section divider for each new category you have infinite you can just add a tag I can add tags as long as I want to and then just because Graham talked about this do you have any thing so mine is just no card system and I've got them on four by six no cards and I put them into categories and so I have one called the inner citadel which is just a category that's dedicated to quotes that help sort of with some of those concepts that we talked about with Boethius and not letting the wheel of fortune dictate your moods so things that you know help you so I'm trying to give an example so here's one that would be in the lower citadel this is from the intellectual life by A.G. A lover of pleasure is an enemy of his body and therefore quickly becomes an enemy of his soul right so then this is Spinoza do not weep do not wax indignant understand so I'm interested in all these other quotes that are kind of help supposed to help one think about you know that which you have the direct control over I've got a category of just things from the middle ages I have something that's called stories that illuminate and what that is is they are like examples of things that happen in the real world that I use as examples that you can draw lessons from so let's see let's see I'm trying to think of an example like for let's see if I can give an example of stories that illuminate here's one Hannibal marched on Rome and rode around the city meanwhile the land his camp was on came up for auction it was sold at normal price Rome would not be intimidated that's a true story happened so Hannibal was riding around Rome but Rome had so much like fortitude and belief that they were going to win and beat Hannibal that the land that the camp enemy was the invading enemy was camping on was sold at the regular normal price that's just like that's all I love that story so I've got that I've got one on just sort of investing I've got a category of mental models which is just sort of structures of mind that can help you make sense of the world so I'm trying to think of here's a mental model again from the intellectual life truth serves only its slaves love it another mental model here's an example the red queen effect so the red queen effect is taken from Alice in Wonderland so in a competitive environment no matter how well one adapts to the environment they have to run to stay still as everyone else is competing to for example if you stand at tiptoes at a concert everybody's now running to stand still the only way you can see the stage is to stand on tiptoes and everybody's exerting more effort and it's all in the same spot that's called the red queen effect it's taken from everybody running to stand to stay still in Alice in Wonderland unless you're like me and you're just wicked tall so that's mental models I've got one called just metaphors one that is an unhelpful category that's just called the magnanimous man which is kind of like just a catch-all I've got one just nature of the economy theology and faith culture which doesn't have very much in their classical education and then another one is called quotes which is kind of just like I don't really know what to do with it so I think this only works if you put the categories in pencil which I don't do which I need to start doing and then allow your categories to change but the best thing about having them in no cards is you can take a giant stack of them and then you can just sit with them and if you're working on a talk you can now make a separate stack of all of these quotes that all sort of relate to each other so to see how these things sort of interconnect to me has been incredibly helpful and then I've got just a stack of a backlog of cards here that don't have a home yet and I don't know where they're going to go and these are the ones that I just did but I mean just did six months ago until you find out what like you look for a commonality in the creating a topic I know I'm kind of in a crisis of tagging right now which is what I just sort of described which is I have these tags which I started but I'm realizing that as the book grows the tags are less helpful so I feel like it would have been better if I had erasable tags and more flexible tags or I need it looks like a shoebox they're 3x5 cards and they also have paper providers inside of that I'm so early in doing a commonplace book that my topics are just way bigger and more general so instead of investing in economics being two different ones I just have a big business category so mine is still it just feels like it's still growing at this point and eventually will split out into smaller categories Greg just mentioned that one benefit of commonplace is when you have to speak you have background material that you've been collecting instead of having to do it all at once which is awesome or it's not just coming out of whatever I'm reading right now or getting sketchy quotes from the internet have you guys ever heard the C.S. Lewis quote what is it an education without values as useful as it is it seems to make man a more clever devil yeah I think it's there's a Duke Duke Wordsworth something like that it's the thing is it's quoted from the abolition of man but it's funny instead of quoting Lewis quoting this guy no he never said it's not in his book it's not the abolition of man in fact he would argue that there is no such thing as an education without values that's what the abolition of man is about you cannot get outside the towel that's all of chapter two so I don't know where this comes from I seem to vaguely remember something about clever devil in Lewis somewhere but it's certainly not the abolition of man but that quote is everywhere online yeah it's the trouble with quotes online is context right like everyone so brevity is the soul of wit that's a great sounding quote it's also spoken by a complete bloviate in Hamlet so that adds a layer of its interpretation to it so I don't know it's just well there's also another one quotation is a useful substitute for wit but that's always attributed to Oscar Wilde and again Oscar Wilde didn't say that someone else said that and the quotation is way different that's really funny yeah just because y'all brought this up what do you include on that note card so there's a quote itself you include where it came from who said in the book that was from you date the cards not really no I don't date them mine's automatically dated and for title it depends where I type it and one if I type it will automatically take the first line which is perfectly possible for me do you mean date by like when the book was written or when I wrote it oh no I don't do that do you put when the book was written not really not particularly if I'm quoting friends I'll put who said it and I was going to ask that too so we talked about including books I had a conversation this morning that there are all these things I want to mull over from the conversation do you include just regular quotations oh I'm in Hanenberg's commonplace book now these are crap if I'm going to do this well I need to love the students I did say that on a stress machines everything I love is expensive in class googling googling meet local single metalheads oh shouldn't click on that yeah that was in rhetoric decaf is like a mother-in-law's kiss stop washing your hands fool that's what it says in proverbs that one I can't read okay I kind of feel like there are people who are better than people on the aristocracy also browsing in rhetoric Katy Perry nope Alan Greenspan now we're talking oh man I don't have any I don't I don't do you include personal quotations probably because my like it's yeah you can do it right then there with Evernote whereas the limitation of my system is I'm sitting down with like cars at my desk would you like to see one of yours no yeah I do yeah for sure this was you after a hard week I have scotch at home life will be okay I don't remember saying that oh you did is that the only you have oh let me see I think maybe makes me nervous I've been working with Graham for a long time I googled bees and this is not you mean bees it's from Dracula do you want to hear it yeah sure chasing an errant swarm of bees is nothing to following a naked lunatic way harder to get a naked loony when he's trying to escape no I didn't but I should have I guess I didn't think about this until you started doing that this YouTube channel has since shut down I think the name is every frame of painting what they did is essentially this where they would watch films and then split up the clips and then tag them with what is happening in this clip is this a certain type of shot is this a certain type of character and then what they would do is they would look at under each category what do we have a ton of clips of do we have a ton of clips about heroes we have a ton of clips about how people show past time what do we have lots of and then they would build their videos around that so I'm just curious is that a way that you all use the system also to look and say I have an interest in this topic or I want to write or speak or whatever on certain topics do you ever use the comics that way oh I mean I feel like you definitely looked through my comics books and things I wrote you would get a sense as to what I valued for sure I think yeah you definitely the longer you do it you go back and you realize that you had these trains of thoughts or you had these areas of inquiry that you maybe didn't even know you could put a category to it like I don't really know why I'm reading the Shelby Foote's history of the Civil War maybe it's because I live in the South now maybe it's because I live in the United States now maybe is it because you think about how crazy it was that this military engagement in the same country happened I don't even know but if you take all these notes and then you go back maybe it is helpful to say during 2017 to 2020 I really thought a lot about what it meant to be a citizen of a nation especially a nation I wasn't born into so maybe there's a bit of an autobiography that comes with the topics that you're spending time contemplating I think that's the main benefit of doing a chronological commonplace book so it's harder to organize it's harder to find things within it but you see development and there's something to being able to hand on to your kid when I was your age this is what I was reading or thinking about that's super nice I still have my old paper commonplace book it's just this is so much more convenient I like it a lot it's also yours is way more portable so I'm going to think about bring his shoebox I actually forgot mine even though I asked you I'll bring yours I could share a whole notebook worth of quotes hey what did you like this book I can share the whole thing instantly if my house burns down and my complex book goes it's gone if the internet goes away I don't know you can actually save the entire thing in, like, a long text format.
I could just print it out if I wanted to. I do think there's something to writing those words by hand that helps with memory, for sure. And there's a, I think it was Jack London, who, when he wanted to become a writer, like, when that was the career he went after, he would pull out Homer or whatever and just write long passages from Homer. Like, he wanted an authorial voice, and so he just went back to the great, the classics.
Just to feel what it was like to write that sentence. To make that voice his own. This is catechism. So, I'm saying words that are not my own, and then to do the commonplace is to write words that are not your own, so as to, like, fall into that, you know, and to add your voice to the great conversation.
Okay, I think this is good. John Locke has some really strong opinions. If you care to read a new method of making commonplace books, he goes through how to organize, like, a paper book that's, like, cover-to-cover, and he has an organizational system that seems helpful, but since none of us use it, I don't want to overstate that one. Catherine, our other English teacher, has a commonplace book as an assignment in her English class, I believe.
Do you all know what those are in English classes? No, we don't. I also recommend it, but I don't have it as an assignment. That was something that an old English teacher at the school really championed, but I just never really figured out a way to really integrate it in a way that I felt was worthwhile, and not just, like, hoop-jumping for the students.
I do think a lot of our freshmen and sophomores keep one. They know it's coming. It's, I think, they hear their older siblings talk about most... There's one that has been passed down from senior to senior throughout the years that is, that has sort of maybe less than savory entries in it.
And some, I would say many of the student ones, when they talk about, I'm going to add it to my commonplace, it's a funny quote there, but there's something I like about that, of they want to hold on to, you know, like, a particular moment of humor, and that's what AJ just read of his gram quotes. One of my whole notebooks is friends and students quoted, and it's just, you know, I have novel, novel, novel, book, book, book, friends and students. Even in that, that's the way to tell stories about these people you know. Oh, I have a student who, when she received something back that was a good grade or whatnot, she made reference to her friend that she was going under her breath, that she was going to put it in her flex binder.
And I said, what's a flex binder? And she says it's a binder full of things that I can read if I need to remind myself like, I need to flex on myself, I need to remind myself that I did something good. I guess that's kind of like a commonplace book. I thought it was an adorable thing that student contained, I kept a flex binder.
I guess the common topic is, I'm awesome. Which is, yes, hopefully it grows over time. It's not just my fine achievements, but other things that one finds interesting. We don't need to belabor the point, but what is this?
It's a way of collecting what you've been reading and thinking about. It's a way of holding on to important ideas that otherwise you will forget. Yeah. And there's some different ways to use this tool.
So, whereas the three of us are very focused on the information contained in those notes. If you look at pictures of commonplace books, you see it's not only words, it's pictures and drawings to read a quote and then draw a picture that's kind of a response of how you think about that quote. There's an artistic side to it, too. My wife uses Pinterest in this way.
She's a designer, and so she collects a huge repository of just visual references that she can go back to. Yeah. And that's all, and just tying it back in with Marie Kondo, I don't think she's wrong with this already. It takes time to do all of this, but in some way it makes the active reading more worthwhile.
That instead of it just being the pleasant experience of reading through a book that you'll have the vague memory of years later, you're actually saying to yourself, this is what I want to hold on to. This is what I think matters from this book. The little lie I tell myself when I'm working on it is that I'm a monk in scriptorium, and I'm writing down important things that are going to last for generations. Yeah, but it will.
And I feel that way. I feel like a little scriptorium. Especially when I'm on my back store, I've been running for like 40 minutes or whatever. But it's also good use to use my fountain pen.
I was going to say these idols of aristocracy or whatever. Yeah. There are some people who are just better. I feel like there are just some people who are better than me.
I wasn't necessarily putting myself in that better category. I was just making a statement. It was just an observation. Chris Pratt is in that category.
The only time I use a fountain pen is to write down quotes. It's a tactile and delightful experience. It's a better experience right away. So I'm looking through my friends and students and I found another balancing quote.
Another year, another me not winning sexiest male. Thank you, Graham. So I think that's all I have to say. I have no idea how to bounce off of that one.
Every year, every year. It comes and goes, and I am overlooked. One of my students last year said, for the longest time I thought George Clooney was president. That is wonderful.
Any other wonderful quotes you want to end with, Graham? I have no other. It's none that I can talk. My past self is more quotable than my present self.
No, you're doing a wonderful job. But I would blow this to listeners that anything, it's a way of collecting things that have been important to you and make sure that they don't just pass off and forget. Or you forget. If you have an experience of a book and you're like, that book was amazing and then you're not going to remember it in three years.
Not in the same way that you're remembering it now. This is a way to try to keep it. Think about it like the tattoos. Remember, they kind of get baked in and sort of fade in over time where you can apply sunscreen.
Keep them fresh, keep them sharp, get them retraced every now and again. That's really what it's worth. It's to turn back to you in that when you're creating new work or thinking new thoughts, you're building it off of previous thoughts. There's a soul crafting part of it as well.
There's an expansion that is happening of your capacities, of your understanding. There's a humility that builds up. We realize there's so much to learn. You'll never read all the books.
I have a not fully thought through, half-baked spiritual discipline aspect to it as well. I don't really know how to frame yet, but I really do see it as something that is a... It's not like I'm doing this because I want to make myself better, but there's something about humanizing myself by doing this that feels right. So the quote from the beginning was, to copy ten quotations from a single book would take at least half an hour.
My argument in this episode is it's worth a half hour. I'm not disagreeing that it takes a lot of time. I'm saying that it's worthwhile to do that. The copying itself is worth it.
Even if you copied the thing onto a new piece of paper and then threw the piece of paper away, copying itself would be worthwhile. To spend three minutes per quote, to spend three minutes thinking about those great ideas if you're reading the books is worthwhile. That's a good use of your time. Yeah, for sure.
That's the takeaway. Cool. That's all I got. Well, if you have awesome, interesting commonplace books or ideas about commonplace books, email us at classicalstuff at veritasacademy.net.
If your commonplace book is on Twitter, you can tweet us at... It better not be. Well, that'd be interesting to do. Oh, yeah.
You should see which tweets spark joy. Oh, no. I was saying that you send out... Instead of giving quotes to yourself, you're like general...
Oh, yeah. Yeah, like an open commonplace book. We just set up a bot that just tweeted out... That's part of what...
That's true. If you... Yeah, you can tweet us at classicalstuff, C-L-S-C-A-L-Stuff. You can see us at classicalstuff.net.
And, yeah, this has been our commonplace conversation. I don't know how to end this stuff. Hold on. Write down every word we said.
Yeah, add some things we've said to your commonplace book. That would be very delightful. But this is Graham, Thomas, and AJ. Signing off.
Bye. Ciao. Ciao.