This is the virtual haunt of Paul Spillenger the human. As time permits, I will add dollops and pinches of autobiography, tales of my encounters with The Modern World, and theories of this and that. Music too will appear, as if by magic. Spicy passages and mysterious. Images, I reckon, as well. Maybe also some moving pictures. All kinds of detritus, found and invented, I will serve you. And I invite you to comment.
A "commonplace book" is a miscellany of artifacts drawn from its author's life, experiences, and observations. Taken as a whole, it may give the reader a sense of who the writer is, or was, what he valued, what he thought worth keeping, what struck his fancy, what passed through his senses into his mind. Commonplace books began being kept as soon as the economics of small book production made it possible to do so -- the fifteenth century -- and were originally used to copy out passages the author found interesting or important.
Michel de Montaigne
Montaigne kept one, as did Jefferson. But their heyday was the nineteenth century, when Emerson, Thoreau, Twain, Whitman all kept quotations, sketches, and poems in their commonplace books. In some cases, they began to morph into what we might call journals and scrapbooks.
Mark Twain
In some ways, a blog is an amalgam of journal, scrapbook and commonplace book. It is commonly understood as a repository of information and opinion, but although I, like most of us, tend to err on the side of rant, I nurture a hope that over time this will become more of a true commonplace book: a collection of expressions that despite my complete ignorance of their deeper significance somehow manage to coalesce into a museum, or at least an epitaph