The Oxford Dictionary of the American Language defines a commonplace book as “a book into which notable extracts from other works are copied for personal use.” It is a literary collage, arranged around different themes. This is my commonplace book, which, I expect, will evolve over time:

On our time on earth (existential bedrock):

“Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble.” Job 14:1 (KJV)

“Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. . . . The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” Ecclesiastes 1:2 and 9 (KJV)

“Ingress, progress, regress, egress, much alike: blindness seizeth on us in the beginning, labour in the middle, grief in the end, error in all. What day ariseth to us without some grief, care, or anguish? Or what so secure and pleasing a morning have we seen, that hath not been overcast before the evening? A mere temptation is our life. Who can endure the miseries of it? In prosperity we are insolent and intolerable, dejected in adversity, in all fortunes foolish and miserable.” Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (c. 1621-39)

“We drove away from Las Olindas through a series of little dank beach towns with shack-like houses built down on the sand close to the rumble of the surf and larger houses built back on the slopes behind. A yellow window shone here and there, but most of the houses were dark. A smell of kelp came in off the water and lay on the fog. The tires sang on the moist concrete of the boulevard. The world was a wet emptiness.” Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep (1939)

“The four of us were sitting around his kitchen table drinking gin. Sunlight filled the kitchen from the big window behind the sink. There were Mel and me and his second wife, Teresa—Terri we called her—and my wife, Laura. We lived in Albuquerque then. But we were all from somewhere else.” Raymond Carver, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” from the short-story collection of the same title (1981)

“Yossarian was cold, too, and shivering uncontrollably. He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden’s secret. Drop him out of a window and he’ll fall. Set fire to him and he’ll burn. Bury him and he’ll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden’s secret. Ripeness was all.
“‘I’m cold,’ Snowden said. ‘I’m cold.’
“‘There, there,’ said Yossarian. ‘There, there.'”

“That, too, is why this epidemic has taught me nothing new, except that I must fight at your side. I know positively—yes, Rieux, I can say I know the world inside out, as you may see—that each of us has the plague within him; no one, no one on earth is free from it. And I know, too, that we must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in a careless moment we breathe in somebody’s face and fasten the infection on him. What’s natural is the microbe. All the rest—health, integrity, purity (if you like)—is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter. The good man, the man who infects hardly anyone, is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention. And it needs tremendous will-power, a never ending tension of the mind, to avoid such lapses.” Albert Camus (through the character of Jean Tarrou), The Plague, trans. Stuart Gilbert (1948)

“I believe that through discipline, though not through discipline alone, we can achieve serenity, and a certain small but precious measure of freedom from the accidents of incarnation, and charity, and that detachment which preserves the world which it renounces. I believe that through discipline we can learn to preserve what is essential to our happiness in more and more adverse circumstances, and to abandon with simplicity what would else have seemed to us indispensable; that we come a little to see the world without the gross distortion of personal desire, and in seeing it so, accept more easily our earthly privation and its earthly horror . . . Therefore I think that all things which evoke discipline: study, and our duties to men and to the commonwealth, war, and personal hardship, and even the need for subsistence, ought to be greeted by us with profound gratitude, for only through them can we attain to the least detachment; and only so can we know peace.” Robert Oppenheimer, in a letter to his brother Frank (March 1932)

“That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called ‘visions,’ the whole so-called ‘spirit world,’ death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the sense with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. To say nothing of God.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (1904)

“I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise it is false. Whatever is achieved must be achieved from within the subjective energies of creatures, without deadening, with the full exercise of passion, of vision, of pain, of fear, and of sorrow. . . . Who knows what form the forward momentum of life will take in the time ahead or what use it will make of our anguished searching. The most that any one of us can seem to do is to fashion something—an object or ourselves—and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak, to the life force.” Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (1973)

On the richness of life:

“I was thinking that life was a hell of a lot more bounteous than I had ever realized. It rushed over us with more than our senses and our judgment could take in. One life with its love affairs, its operatic ambitions, its dollars and horse races and marriage-designs and old people’s homes is, after all, only a tin dipperful of this superabundance. It rushes up also from within.” Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift (1975)

“Sometimes a cool, colourless day in the months after the rainy season calls back the time of marka mbaya, the bad year, the time of the drought. In those days the Kikuyu used to graze their cows round my house, and a boy amongst them who had a flute, from time to time played a short tune on it. When I have heard this tune again, it has recalled in one single moment all our anguish and despair of the past. It has got the salt taste of tears in it. But at the same time I found in the tune, unexpectedly surprisingly, a vigour, a curious sweetness, a song. Had those hard times really had all these in them? There was youth in us then, a wild hope. It was during those long days that we were all of us merged into a unity, so that on another planet we shall recognise one another, and the things cry to each other, the cuckoo clock and my books to the lean-fleshed cows on the lawn and the sorrowful old Kikuyus: ‘You also were there. You also were part of the Ngong farm.’ That bad time blessed us and went away.” Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa (1938)

“I walked out of the condos onto the flat lithesome beach this morning, and took a walk in my swimming trunks and no shirt on. And I thought that one natural effect of life is to cover you in a thin layer of . . . what? A film? A residue or skin of all the things you’ve done and been and said and erred at? I’m not sure. But you are under it, and for a long time, and only rarely do you know it, except that for some unexpected reason or opportunity you come out—for an hour or even for a moment—and you suddenly feel pretty good. And in that magical instant you realize how long it’s been since you felt just that way. Have you been ill, you ask. Is life itself an illness or a syndrome? Who knows? We’ve all felt that way, I’m confident, since there’s no way that I could feel what hundreds of millions of other citizens haven’t.

“Only suddenly, then, you are out of it—that film, that skin of life—as when you were a kid. And you think: this must’ve been the way it was once in my life, though you didn’t know it then, and don’t really even remember it—a feeling of wind on your cheeks and your arms, of being released, let loose, of being the light-floater. And since that is not how it has been for a long time, you want, this time, to make it last, this glistening one moment, this cool air, this new living, so that you can preserve a feeling of it, inasmuch as when it comes again it may just be too late. You may just be too old. And in truth, of course, this may be the last time that you will ever feel this way again.”

Richard Ford, The Sportswriter (1986)

“Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.”

Delmore Schwartz, “Calmly We Walk Through This April’s Day” from In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories (1938)

“Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.”

T.S. Eliot, “East Coker,” Four Quartets (1943)

“Every year or so in the late evening, usually right after I go to bed, my mind will enter a whirling fugal state where all the stops are pulled with the mind rushing all over the earth and well into space, to the depths of the ocean where the process slows and you can walk along the ocean’s bottom. You’re literally out of control though not at all violently, passing through the homes of friends, huts and kraals in Africa, the bottom of the Amazon’s many rivers, inside the mouth of a lion, the short nap (a split second) in the heart of a whale.” Jim Harrison, Off to the Side (2002)

“I don’t know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives, Henle’s loops and all. Every glistening egg is a memento mori.” Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974)

On nature, and our place in it:

“A weird, lovely, fantastic object out of nature like Delicate Arch has the curious ability to remind us—like rock and sunlight and wind and wilderness—that out there is a different world, older and greater and deeper by far than ours, a world which surrounds and sustains the little world of men as sea and sky surround and sustain a ship. The shock of the real. For a little while we are able to see, as the child sees, a world of marvels. For a few moments we discover that nothing can be taken for granted, for if this ring of stone is marvelous, then all which shaped it is marvelous, and our journey here on earth, able to see and touch and hear in the midst of tangible and mysterious things-in-themselves, is the most strange and daring of all adventures.” Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (1968)

“To see ten thousand animals untamed and not branded with the symbols of human commerce is like scaling an unconquered mountain for the first time, or like finding a forest without roads or footpaths, or the blemish of an axe. You know then what you had always been told—that the world once lived and grew without adding machines and newsprint and brick-walled streets and the tyranny of clocks.” Beryl Markham, West with the Night (1942)

“By means of the machine metaphor we have eliminated any fear or awe or reverence or humility or delight or joy that might have restrained us in our use of the world. We have indeed learned to act as if our sovereignty were unlimited and as if our intelligence were equal to the universe. Our ‘success’ is a catastrophic demonstration of our failure. The industrial Paradise is a fantasy in the minds of the privileged and the powerful; the reality is a shambles.” Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America (1977)

“Man always kills the thing he loves, and so we the pioneers have killed our wilderness. Some say we had to. Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?” Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (1949)

“The use of the world is finally a personal matter, and the world can be preserved in health only by the forbearance and care of a multitude of persons.” Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America (1977)

“Recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind.” Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (1949)

“From here I had ridden farther and higher into the wilderness of the Sierra Madre. Why I was there and where, I did not know. It is only youth that believes the secret of life lies just over the next mysterious range of mountains rather in the more mysterious wilderness within us.” Frank Waters, Pumpkin Seed Point (1969)

“The land is clearing gradually. I have never seen such contrasts of black rock and white snow, and White Island was capped with great ranges of black cumulus, over which rose the pure white peaks of the Royal Society Range in a blue sky. And now Observation Hill and Castle Rock are in front. I don’t suppose I shall ever see this view again: but it is associated with many memories of returning to home and plenty after some long and hard journeys: in some ways I feel sorry—but I have seen it often enough.” Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World (1922)

On the diversions of the opposite sex:

“There be three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four which I know not:
The way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a maid.” Proverbs 30:18-19 (KJV)

“To expel grief, and procure pleasure, sweet smells, good diet, touch, taste, embracing, singing, dancing, sports, plays, and above the rest, exquisite beauties, are most powerful means, to meet or see a fair maid pass by, or to be in company with her. To play the fool now and then is not amiss, there is a time for all things.” Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (c. 1621-39)

“If I had no duties, and no reference to futurity, I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman; but she should be one who could understand me, and would add something to the conversation.” Samuel Johnson, as quoted in James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson (September 1777)

“But life goes on and on we go, spinning along the coast in a violet light, past Howard Johnson’s and the motels and the children’s carnival. We pull into a bay and have a drink under the stars. It is not a bad thing to settle for the Little Way, not the big search for the big happiness, but the sad little happiness of drinks and kisses, a good little car and a warm deep thigh.” Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (1961)

“‘Stay longer,’ he said in her ear. ‘I can’t,’ she said, but she held on for a moment, and then she pulled away and ran to climb into her car. The headlights lit up. The engine coughed and started. Morgan stood watching after her, pinching his lower lip between his fingers and thinking of what he should have said: Come even it’s Sunday. Promise you’ll come Monday. Why don’t you wear gloves? Mornings, now, when I wake up, I have this springy, hopeful feeling, and I see that everything is worth it, after all.” Anne Tyler, Morgan’s Passing (1980)

“But then you get [a kiss] like that first whizzer on Kibbee’s lumber pile, one that come out of the brain and the heart and the crotch, and out of the hands on your hair, and out of those breasts that weren’t all the way blown up yet, and out of the clutch them arms give you, and out of time itself, which keeps track of how long it can go on without you gettin’ even slightly bored the way you got bored years later with kissin’ almost anybody but Helen, and out of fingers (Katrina had fingers like that) that run themselves around and over your face and down your neck, and out of the grip you take on her shoulders, especially on them bones that come out of the middle of her back like angel wings, and out of them eyes that keep openin’ and closin’ to make sure that this is still goin’ and still real and not just stuff you dream about and when you know it’s real it’s okay to close ’em again, and outa that tongue, holy shit, that tongue, you gotta ask where she learned that because nobody ever did that that good except Katrina who was married and with a kid and had a right to know, but Annie, goddamn, Annie, where’d you pick that up, or maybe you been gidzeyin’ heavy on this lumber pile regular (No, no, no I know you never, I always knew you never), and so it is natural with a woman like Annie that the kiss come out of every part of her body and more, outa that mouth with them new teeth Francis is looking at, with the same lips he remembers and doesn’t want to kiss anymore except in memory (though that could be subject to change), and he sees well beyond the mouth into a primal location in this woman’s being, a location that evokes in him not only the memory of years but decades and even more, the memory of epochs, aeons, so that he is sure that no matter where he might have sat with a woman and felt this way, whether it was in some ancient cave or some bogside shanty, or a North Albany lumber pile, he and she would both know that there was something in each of them that had to stop being one and become two, that had to swear that forever after there would never be another (and there never has been, quite), and that there would allegiance and sovereignty and fidelity and other such tomfool horseshit that people destroy their heads with when what they are saying has nothing to do with time’s forevers but everything to do with the simultaneous recognition of an eternal twain, well sir, then both of them, Francis and Annie, or the Francises and Annies of any age, would both know in that same instant that there was something between them that had to stop being two and become one.” William Kennedy, Ironweed (1983) (Now that’s a sentence, a hell of a sentence, a sentence of Faulknerian length and complexity.)

“There was a very lovely girl working with the others at the well. Her hair was braided, except where it was cut in a fringe across her forehead, and fell in a curtain of small plaits around her neck. She wore various silver ornaments and several necklaces, some of large cornelians, others of small white beads. Round her waist she had half a dozen silver chains, and above them her sleeveless blue tunic gaped open to show small firm breasts. She was very fair. When she saw I was trying to take a photograph of her she screwed up her face and stuck out her tongue at me. Salim, thinking to help me, had told her not to move and explained what I was doing. During the following days both he and Ahmad chaffed me whenever I was silent, saying that I was thinking of the girl at Manwakh, which was frequently true.” Wilfred Thesiger, Arabian Sands (1959) (Thesiger—even Thesiger—thought about more than camels, sand dunes, and the Empty Quarter.)

“My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.
For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;
The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;
The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell. Arise, my love, and come away.
O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs, let me see thy countenance, let me hear they voice, for sweet is they voice, and thy countenance is comely.”

Song of Solomon, 2:10-14 (KJV)

“Woman, I sing to you now from a new season.
I sing from the freshened creeks,
From the autumn’s waning.
I sing where the wind runs in from a wide sea,
Wakens these winter-wet fields to new growth,
A new greening.

I sing from a fallow year that has since been broken;
From a drought, a year that has died,
Gone down into deadness.
Known now of your mouth, known of your healing hand,
I sing to you from a richening joy,
A ripening gladness. . . .

I move to meet you now in a greening time.
I come with wind and with wet
In a soft season.
I bring you my hand.
I bring you the flesh of those fallow, fallen years;
And my manifest reasons.”

Brother Antoninus/William Everson, “The Blowing of the Seed: Epilogue in a Mild Winter, from the Coast Country” from A Balm for All Burning (1946-48)

“And now I’m feelin’ better
‘Cause I found out for sure.
She took me to her doctor,
And he told me of a cure.
He said that any love is good love,
So I took what I could get,
Yes, I took what I could get.
And then she looked at me with those big brown eyes
And said, ‘You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.'”

Randy Bachman, “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet” (1974)

“The movements of her mouth were beautifully decisive, and her voice, abandoning its synthetic fuzziness, had returned to its usual clarity. These things helped to give her presence a solidity and emphasis that impressed him; he felt not so much her sexual attraction as the power of her femaleness.” Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (1953)

On other people generally:

“It is one of my sources of happiness never to desire a knowledge of other people’s business.” Dolley Madison (context and date unknown)

“There are many things in your heart you can never tell to another person. They are you, your private joys and sorrows, and you can never tell them. You cheapen yourself, the inside of yourself, when you tell them.” Attributed to Greta Garbo (context and date unknown)

“The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous and likable. In three days no one could stand him.” Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)

“So this is hell. I’d never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture chambers, the fire and brimstone, the ‘burning marl.’ Old wives’ tales! There’s no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is other people!” Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit (1944)

“Speaking generally, for myself, I like people. Though not very much. Speaking particularly, I like some people, dislike others. Like everyone else who hasn’t been reduced to moronism by our commercial boy scout ethic, I like some people, dislike others, and regard strangers with a tolerant indifference.” Edward Abbey, Slickrock (1971)

“In the family in which I live there are four people of whom I am afraid. Three of these four people are afraid of me, and each of these three is also afraid of the other two. Only one member of my family is not afraid of any of the others, and that one is an idiot.” Joseph Heller, Something Happened (1975)

On the ego in the world:

“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.” Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1849)

“If a man has any greatness in him, it comes to light, not in one flamboyant hour, but in the ledger of his daily work.” Beryl Markham, West with the Night (1942)

My current thinking on this subject:

As  adolescents most of us are intent on establishing our separate lives and identities—our selves—in the world. In many traditional societies young men and women (but mostly men) established their identities within the group through the mechanism famously described by Joseph Campbell: the hero’s journey. As young adults they left their homes and struck out on solitary quests; encountered dangerous obstacles or engaged dangerous adversaries (an enemy, a totemic animal); and, if successful, returned home to provide for themselves and their families. And their lifelong identity was based on those youthful quests/conquests. In modern societies the quest has become less physical, less literal, but it continues to be the mechanism by which young people seek to distinguish themselves and establish their identities within the group.

But as we grow older (and presumably more comfortable in our own skin), we come to realize the futility of the task we have been unconsciously devoting ourselves to. We come to realize that the world is greater than any of us ever imagined (or could imagine); greater, indeed, than our selves; and that our egos—which we worked so hard to establish, which we have protected at great cost, and of which we are inordinately proud—are, in many senses, ridiculous, monstrous creations. And with that realization comes shame and fear. And, for some, a new way forward. As many religions have taught, we come to realize that the best we can do with our lives is to devote them to a common or mutual project: to helping our fellow creatures by seeking to ameliorate this dangerous world we all inhabit.

And thus, as we grow even older, life becomes a tricky balance: to maintain our individual identities and egos at the same time that we seek to expend or obliterate them in the cause of the greater good.