Commonplace

I jotted down the lines in my commonplace after reading the poem in some anthology or another. I can no longer remember the book that I took it out of, but I remember the speckled black-and-white composition book and the way that it used to feel so weighty and important to copy beautiful things line by line. I used to be so precious about it.

The poem was a work in translation – originally written by Fyodor Tyutchev, this version of “Last Love” was translated from the Russian by Vladimir Nabokov. The middle stanza read as follows:

Blue shade takes half the world away:
through western clouds alone some light is slanted.
O tarry, O tarry, declining day,
enchantment, let me stay enchanted.

I’m partial to this translation. There’s something to the way these lines hold space in my mouth, I keep coming back to them like an echo unbidden. It is only this part of the poem that I care about – how it describes the quality of light (a shard of honey – both sharp and liquid), that blue shade takes (an amorphous shape, a covetous thing), and how time declines (as in a refusal? a sloping line? a declension?) that captures my imagination.

—

I used to have a sharp memory – and it was aided by this practice of regularly commonplacing. I was introduced to the idea early in high school, visiting the archives of a local university to see a hefty leather-bound compendium of knowledge from Colonial America.

The author of this enormous tome, Francis Daniel Pastorius, was the founder of the Philadelphia neighborhood where I went to school. The dearth of printed matter in 17th-century Pennsylvania meant that Pastorius took to regularly copying passages from borrowed books as they crossed his path to use for future reference. It was, functionally, a homemade encyclopedia.

Pastorius referred to his commonplace as the “Beehive” – and it did include some excerpted texts about beekeeping among everything else he cataloged and categorized. He saw himself as the industrious bee, taking quotations from the pages of other books as a bee gathers pollen from flowers.

The original cover was hand-mended, and the paper was the tawny vellum of beautiful old things. Pastorius’s writing, which included German, Latin, and English text, was an elegantly shaped scrawl that made use of all available writing space.

—

When I started to commonplace shortly after that trip, I tried to use my very best handwriting – slowly measuring out the words to ensure their even spacing across the page. I used to have this kind of attention to words – a sharp focus on the crafting of sentences. The act of copying helped me digest these little gemlike lines, and their beauty could stick with me for a little while.

—

This is not the first time that I have likened myself to a magpie.

—

At 16, I traveled to Dead Horse Bay for the first time. I was fascinated by mentions of a beach in New York City covered in glass bottles and on a bitterly cold weekend I made my way to the shores of Jamaica Bay to see it for myself. It was a former landfill, and it had now become a place to mudlark and listen to the sounds of sea glass jangling in the surf.

I’ve written down my thoughts about visiting the bay before, and have copied that description here. (It feels fitting to be taking fragments of writing and repurposing them in this way when talking about commonplacing.)

The castoffs that came out into the bay were mostly glass bottles and pieces of twisted unrecognizable metal. Sometimes, I saw chipped teacups and pieces of dinner plates in the sand and surf as well. Everything spread out over the beach like a mosaic, and it glittered in the cold January sun.

I picked up little souvenirs from these outings – shards of opaque sea-softened glass in shades of green, and small jars in milky white and cobalt blue that would have once held cold creams and cosmetics. Overall, it was a strange and lonely place – and at the time, I fancied myself strange and a little bit lonely as well.

When I returned to Philadelphia, I needed to explain my month away to a group of my peers. Each student delivered their presentations in turn, and I shared a slideshow with images. There were pictures documenting my daily work alongside wide panoramic photographs of the bay. I don’t recall anything in particular that I spoke about, but I remember that whatever I said was spoken into the space of the third-floor art classroom. I adored that room.

Fragments of memories of this room return as I write this: classes that taught me new words and ways of looking. How I discovered names of hues across a gradient by reading tubes of paint – distinguishing between cadmium yellow, warm ochre, raw sienna, or umber. How idle stretching during an art history class became a lesson in contrapposto. How projections of masterworks – even when distorted across the screen in a keystone angle – were gorgeous. (The Book of Hours belonging to the Duke of Berry, The Hunters in the Snow by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Apollo and Daphne carved in (or perhaps, released from) marble by Gian Lorenzo Bernini.) How these things still inform what I love to look at.

I was a nervous public speaker, and I kept my eyes fixed on the staircase in the back of the room, hoping that smiling and looking just over the tops of the heads of my classmates would be a convincing facsimile of charisma. I’ve gotten better at the performance of speaking.

Now can I hold my gaze steady until the other person blinks or looks away.

—

I’ve kept little pieces from my Dead Horse Bay collection in my home. Here, a milk bottle turned flower vase. There, little jars where I keep buttons and store safety pins. In an aspirational attempt to elevate the beachcombing detritus, I’ve mounted an assemblage in a shadowbox, a three-by-three grid comprised of jagged pieces of ceramics in chinoiserie patterns.

I love my little treasures – these beautiful, useless things.

—

In my freshman fall, now enrolled at the university where I had seen the Beehive years before, I was introduced to the concept of the Wunderkammer. The ethos of this seventeenth-century “cabinet of curiosities” appealed to me – sparking questions about collections and the collectors that gathered them.

These cabinets of curiosities were proto-museum spaces, archiving dazzling arrays of art and objects from the natural world. Each collection was wholly unique to their creators – what one finds, what one finds beautiful, that which is worthy of possessing. I saw in them the same kind of keen attention to detail and desire for interconnectivity that I had known in Pastorius’s work.

Inside my own commonplace book at the time, I rewrote the words of Walter Benjamin: “Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories.”

My humble approximation of the wunderkammer: a printers tray with little ceramic curios in the boxes that once housed letters, and a notebook filled with quotations that were once housed within books.

—

Last summer, I visited one of the grandest examples of the cabinet of curiosities – the Kunstkammer Wien, housed within the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. It had been eleven years since I had studiously examined the Wunderkammer in the college classroom. I was traveling with friends – though I chose to visit the museum alone to take in the collection.

The Kunstkammer Wien, amassed over generations by collectors in the House of Habsburg, forms the core of the contemporary museum. There are countless works of art, and wherever one turns there are exquisite paintings, bejeweled reliquaries, and marble busts capturing the distinctive profiles of the Habsburg family.

I saw objects that may have been better suited for a natural history museum, if not for the precious metals and stones encasing them: shells and horns and bezoars, each filigreed in gold. Rooms are dedicated to delicate scientific instruments: cleverly shaped automatons, numerous clocks, and mechanical globes to chart astrological measurements. These reflect an attention to one’s place in the universe and a precision to timekeeping that I did not think possible for the seventeenth century.

The entirety of the original collection is not on display, yet the portion that I saw was nonetheless an overwhelming beauty. And I mean overwhelming – while there, I experienced a degree of sensory overload surrounded by so much abject wealth, the inconceivable grandeur communicated by the artifacts of an empire.

I took pictures of items that interested me, certain that I could not take everything in at the moment, knowing that I would want to look back on these things later once I had time to digest. A year on, scrolling through my phone for reference material, what I notice most is the way that my reflection haunts the glass vitrines in every photograph.

—

The literal translation of Wunderkammer from German is Wonder Room. When I first contemplated collecting in that college classroom, I was limited in the ways I could conceive of (and therefore categorize) the world. I thought about beauty, the ways that wonderment is adjacent to awe. Yet still, there is a double meaning to wonder – the prodding reflection that asks to think deeply, to doubt. Intertwining the two, I am glad to find that there are opportunities for awe in the questioning.

—

So much of the Kunstkammer Wien collection is deeply political.

Which objects were given to gain favor, solidifying relationships between members of the Habsburg family and their courts? Which objects stood as a testament to the owner’s piety, like evidence of a divine right to rule? Which objects declared worldliness, defining what was cosmopolitan for the masses? Which objects were pilfered, pillaged, plundered, poached – the riches of colonies, the exploitation of others?

It is in this way that the political is also personal.

The expanse of this historic empire trickled into the conversations I had in Vienna with my friends over coffee. We sat in some of the most sumptuously decorated rooms I have ever seen and we discussed our lives in long conversations. The yellow in the Brazilian flag comes from the Habsburgs, Thiago tells us. They extended all the way to Lviv, Marta adds – the city where she and I had reunited the time I went to visit her in Ukraine before the war began. In these small ways, so much of the splendor I saw felt connected to the places these people I love consider home.

To live in this globalized world, in a friendship that spans four continents, is a beautiful thing. Yet it also pushes me to consider what exists beneath beauty. As we talked, it almost felt possible to look at a map, examine these objects one by one, to chart the histories of each of these moments in reverse, to unspool time to come to a definitive understanding of how and why.

This is part of an insatiable urge that underpins all collections, I think: a desire to want to make sense of everything.

Our conversations meandered, our coffee got cold. There were no clear conclusions – and in truth, I would not want that sense of an ending. (Where will I be, when there are no more stories in these friendships to make sense of?) Perhaps it is enough to be grateful for the eclectic set of circumstances that allow us to gather, grateful for all that we have in common.

—

I don’t commonplace anymore. It was a habit that I lost halfway through undergrad. I wasn’t reading for pleasure enough to sustain the practice – and it seemed silly to copy down passages from my course readings. I started consuming more academic articles – expansive contemplative pieces that pushed me to think in myriad new ways, but rarely made me pause with wonder for the love of the sentence itself. Besides, I had other things to occupy my time with – I didn’t need to retreat into books.

Still, over the past year, so much has changed in my life. My sibling died unexpectedly last August. I lack the words to express the depth of my sorrow – and I keep coming back to describing myself as unmoored.

I’ve found myself wanting the familiar comfort of old habits, old ways of looking. I am thinking so much about Benjamin’s chaos of memory.

What do we collect? And why?

I find a reassuring weight to tiny things, ephemeral moments made less ephemeral by the tangible evidence of the experience. Here – glass jars in cobalt blue found at Dead Horse Bay, a tiny box of fortune cookie fortunes, a rose dried and saved from a bouquet, a photograph from a national park taped to my refrigerator, a lace snowflake hanging off a houseplant. There – a corner of my personal library dedicated to paperbacks I loved as a child, a jar of pebbles collected off the strand from our town in Ireland, a postcard of a Rothko painting, a bent one yuan coin from a magic show, a plane ticket pressed safely inside of an old journal.

And what do I have of my sibling? In the corner with my backpacks, the green army surplus rucksack that they were never without. In my basement, their fully stocked toolboxes. On a shelf, a hand-sized tile they bought for a renovation project they never finished – a perfect match for the patterned porcelain bathroom tiles in their West Philly home. Now stored behind a closed closet door, a pair of black canvas shoes that I brought home so that their cat might feel comforted by the familiar scent. Sprawled languidly across the rug behind me as I write, the cat.

My little artifacts can’t aspire to inclusion in a museum collection, but they are the things that make up a life. And maybe the narrative I create from this collection of items is a way of parsing out meaning from all of the chaos.

I wish that I didn’t but I often feel a need to prove something to myself – I was here, I lived this, I got a souvenir. I think that this is a big part of the reason why I buy postcards in each city I visit, dutifully mailing letters to friends at home. I delight in the tangibility of mail and the way it takes time – to compose, to arrive – a pause in between messages that allows the original idea to be half-forgotten until a faster medium like a text message pops up on my phone to say: I got your letter, thank you, you’re on my mind.

When I was in Vienna, I wrote out a postcard to my sibling. It was the lighthearted kind of message I always sent – I have seen this thing, I am thinking of you, I love you, I will see you soon. I was back in Philadelphia by the time it arrived, and my sibling had been dead for a week.

—

Grief has reshaped my world. I think: when will enough time have passed to make sense of this? To take stock of the memories, to find a way to order them into a narrative I can hold? To create the requisite distance between what was and what is in order to discover what can still be?

—

I’ve been thinking about starting to commonplace again this summer. I’d like to regain the way I used to read, and the passion I used to bring to my relationship with books. There’s a comfort in borrowing the words of others when I do not yet have my own.

What is a collection, besides a grouping of items that can be broken up, reconfigured, and redefined? Meaning is granted in the act and art of curation. I am trying to make that sense of meaning once again – to rebuild a cohesive sense of self. As distant as that goal can sometimes feel, I am grateful for the ways that wonder can emerge through the prism of a text, and how it ripples across my life in the most generous and unexpected of moments.

There are days still when I can look at the expanse of sky and think: “enchantment, let me stay enchanted”.