“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Three words after the breath.
The letter · 1
Ten we kept this week, and how to keep your own.
The photograph of the page is still in the camera roll. The sentence is in a Notes file you never open. You wanted the line back.
Private. Five seconds. A commonplace book is that habit, finished.
Ten we kept
“The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.”
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
The large answer does not arrive.
“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
A way to name a year.
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun
Still in the room.
“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
The fear is the love.
“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
Simone Weil, letter to Joë Bousquet, 13 April 1942
What you give a page.
“If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.”
W. H. Auden, The More Loving One
A private vow.
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
The last line. It still holds.
“All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.”
Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower
A law, not a comfort.
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.”
Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot
Scale, then the kitchen.
How to keep your own
Collect an item from anything you are reading. The text, its source, the date. A photo of the page is enough. Typing it is enough. An annotation if you want one. A few words about why it stayed. Skip it if the line is enough.
You are its keeper, not its author. Nothing every day. No streak. Later, once you have half-forgotten it, the item returns as a recollection. That is the whole point.
Not a journal. Not a feed. Not a writers platform. A collected item is the unit. No one else is in the room.
How to keep a commonplace book
The next letter
Ten more when we have them.
Adam