The Way the World Works: Essays by Nicholson Baker

to thread her words on the page, Where you go, I follow. Such labor is usefully humbling, because it delivers you back into the third grade, when you copied things off the board and had to pay attention to the little boat shape in the last stroke of the cursive capital B, but it isn’t mechanical or fancy-cramping because the transcriber’s mind can think its own pinstriped thoughts on the sly, betweentimes.
    And, just as helpfully, every appealing highpoint that you read with transient delight can become, throughcommonplacing, merely average: it is no longer the jewel it was when you pried it from the dried salt marsh of its page, but has now itself been reduced to the primordial matter out of which only your own writing can lift and deliver you—you become, even textually, Sir Thomas Browne’s Amphibian, “compelled to live in divided and distinguished worlds”—between the belly-squirming world of sedulous apprenticeship, and the nakedly leaping bipedal world of self-expression. Thus Bach copied out Buxtehude’s and Vivaldi’s music to learn its secrets, staying up late in his brother’s latticed music library even though forbidden to do so; thus Wallace Stevens copied out in his commonplace book (entitled Sur Plusieurs Beaux Sujets ) what D. J. Bach had to say about Schoenberg; thus E. M. Forster in middle age copied out Tennyson and Macaulay; and thus Gibbon copied over Pascal, and Giannone’s History of the Kingdom of Naples:
    This various reading, which I now conducted with discretion, was digested, according to the precept and model of Mr. Locke, into a large commonplace-book; a practice, however, which I do not strenuously recommend. The action of the pen will doubtless imprint an idea on the mind as well as the paper; but I much question whether the benefits of this laborious method are adequate to the waste of time; and I must agree with Dr. Johnson (Idler, No. 74), ‘that what is twice read is commonly better remembered than what is transcribed.’
    But that’s not true, is it? Gibbon couldn’t have formed his style—that unique window display of teacups and sarcophagi—without having felt his way, word by word, at the artificially impeded speed of handwriting, through some of the poetry of Gray and Pope, for instance. Probably heremembered Johnson’s Idler essay because he had once been moved to commonplace it himself.
    To commonplace —is it a legal verb? It is, according to Samuel Johnson:
    Commonplace-book
    A book in which things to be remembered are ranged under general heads.
    I turned to my common-place book and found his case under the word coquette. Tatler .
    To Commonplace
    To reduce to general heads.
    I do not apprehend any difficulty in commonplacing an universal history. Felton .
    “Felton” turns out to be one Henry Felton, D.D., who in A Dissertation on the Classics (1710) wasn’t sure that the activity of reducing to general heads was always beneficial:
    Common-Placing the Sense of an Author, is such a stupid Undertaking, that, if I may be indulged in saying it, they want common Sense that practise it. What Heaps of this Rubbish have I seen! O the Pains and Labour to record what other People have said, that is taken by those, who have nothing to say themselves! . . . When I see a beautiful Building of exact Order and Proportion, taken down, and the different Materials laid together by themselves, it putteth me in mind of these Common-Place Men .
    Felton may be right—you don’t want to take it too far. Charles Reade, the nineteenth-century novelist, had so many commonplace books that “they completely filled one of therooms in his house,” according to Richard Le Gallienne. He devoted one full day out of each week “cataloguing the notes of his multifarious reading.” Still, it worked for him. The big risk, if you accumulate a lot of chirographic bits and pieces, is that you will be tempted to quote more of them than you should. In a review of a book called The Progress