Happy Birthday, Jefferson

Scully, Thomas Jefferson, 1821

I was in the habit of abridging and commonplacing what I read meriting it, and of sometimes mixing my own reflections on the subject. I now inclose you the extract from these entries which I promised. they were written at a time of life when I was bold in the pursuit of knolege, never fearing to follow truth and reason to whatever results they led, & bearding every authority which stood in their way. this must be the apology, if you find the conclusions bolder than historical facts and principles will warrant. Accept with them the assurances of my great esteem and respect.

Thomas Jefferson, born on this day in 1743, from a letter to Thomas Cooper

Transcribe.

Getting the most out of the reading life ...

1. Read aloud: different forms of cognition and expression make for deeper meaning.
2. Develop a system of marginalia: transform the pages into personal maps of thought.
3. Transcribe inspirational passages: different forms of cognition and expression make for deeper meaning.

Thanks to Steve and Kurt.

Escape.

A journal takes the place of a confidant, that is, of friend or wife; it becomes a substitute for production, a substitute for country and public. 

It is a grief-cheating device, a mode of escape and withdrawal; but, factotum as it is, though it takes the place of everything, properly speaking it represents nothing at all.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel

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Fund.

Scholars, amateur scientists, aspiring men of letters — just about anyone with intellectual ambition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was likely to keep a commonplace book. In its most customary form, “commonplacing,” as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one’s reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations. It was a kind of solitary version of the original web logs: an archive of interesting tidbits that one encountered during one’s textual browsing. The great minds of the period — Milton, Bacon, Locke — were zealous believers in the memory-enhancing powers of the commonplace book. There is a distinct self-help quality to the early descriptions of commonplacing’s virtues: in the words of one advocate, maintaining the books enabled one to “lay up a fund of knowledge, from which we may at all times select what is useful in the several pursuits of life.”

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