On keeping a commonplace book
A four-hundred-year-old note-taking habit, and why it still beats every app I've tried.
Before the personal knowledge management industry, before the second brain, there was the commonplace book: a single notebook where you copied out, by hand, the passages worth keeping.
The copying is the point. Retyping a sentence you admire is a small apprenticeship in how it was made — where the comma lands, how the rhythm turns. You cannot get that from a clipped highlight.
“We are what we copy out, twice over: once into the book, once into ourselves.”
How to start
Buy a notebook you like enough to carry. When a sentence stops you, write it down in full, with its source. Do not organise. Do not tag. Re-read it on slow afternoons. That is the whole system, and it has outlasted every app that promised to replace it.
