In Praise of Pieces

Commonplace Books, Friendship Quotes, and Our Bookless Book Club

In the fall of 1996, no doubt under the influence of Oprah Winfrey (and who wasn’t?), my friends and I—high school students around 17-years-old—decided to form a book club, a book club that was remarkable for being ahead of its time because—and this was when Winfrey and co. were reading books by Wally Lamb, Jacquelyn Mitchard, and Anita Shreve—we didn’t read books at all. 

Or at least, we didn’t read books together. The idea of a book club was new enough that we didn’t have a template, we were making it up from scratch, so steeped in our teenage self-centredness that we possibly thought that Oprah got the idea from us. Which meant that we were unbound by perceptions of a book club’s middlebrow sensibilities, we didn’t make jokes about wine club (there was no wine at our book club), or chastise ourselves for conversations that veered off-track. Because there was no track, just as there was no book, instead a constellation of seemingly arbitrary points of connection, our passionate conversations reaching for something that none of us were capable of grasping. Not yet.

The books we did bring to book club—weekly gatherings in our cluttered teenage bedrooms—were notebooks, with lines or grids providing a vague framework with which to contain the sprawl of our questions and yearning, and pages which came to hold some many of our revelations and epiphanies. Lines like, “Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bullfighters,” which I encountered in my Grade 12 English study of The Sun Also Rises, and which managed to convey something essential about the way I wanted to live my life, an essence I still identify almost three decades later, never mind that I have little truck with bullfighting, or Hemingway’s flagrant masculinity, and am in bed every night by 11:00.

There seemed an urgency to the matter of figuring out how to live life, never mind all the way up. The stakes were high. It had not occurred to us how long life would turn out to be, if we were lucky, never mind how many times we’d have to—we’d get to—start over. A few years later, in a university English class—my book club notebook by then long abandoned—I’d encounter a line from Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia that would have seemed at home on the notebook’s pages: “It's the best possible time of being alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.” Though what I didn’t know then, and which I only know now on the basis of having come of age at the dawn of a troubled century, is that—so far—it’s always been that time, that everything I thought I knew would be wrong over and over.

But in 1996, I had no idea. About the mutability of truth, how a heart can change, and that learning is ever a process of discovery. Instead, on the cusp of our lives, if felt as the world was waiting for us to reach out and take it, to hold it, if we dared, and with the fragments we collected in our notebooks, it seemed like we almost could:  “It had always seemed to Emily, ever since she could remember, that she was very, very near to a world of wonderful beauty. Between it and herself hung only a thin curtain; she could never draw the curtain aside—but sometimes, just for a moment, a wind fluttered it and then it was as if she caught a glimpse of the enchanting realm beyond—only a glimpse—and heard a note of unearthly music.”

The question of why we just didn’t read entire books is a worthwhile one. Instead of glimpsing enchanting realms, why didn’t we actually voyage to one? Become immersed in the place and explore it? Why did the fragment seem so much more compelling than the whole? Why did we imagine that pieces would suffice?

But back then, you see, the pieces were everything, and we were well-versed in how they could create a simulacrum of the world, of life itself. Everything was a patchwork in our teenage years, from the posters and flyers taped to our bedroom walls, photos stuck into the edges of our mirrors, to the song lyrics we etched onto canvas pencil cases, the fabric squares stitched onto our denim.

For years, I’d been keeping a commonplace book, although I hadn’t known to call it that, had no idea, actually, that this was part of a tradition in English letters stretching back centuries: “Such books are similar to scrapbooks filled with items of many kinds: notes, proverbs, adages, aphorisms, maxims, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, prayers, legal formulas, and recipes.” And okay, mine were light on of the tables of weights and measures, legal formulas and recipes, but everything about it was a sort of prayer. I’d called mine my “Anything Book,” and my BFF called hers a “Nothing Book,” and it was soon after we met and realized we both maintained these scrapbooks that I knew we would always be friends.

I have to conjure most of this from memory. I kept meticulous records of my teenage years (“these things they go away, replaced by every day”—so went a song of the era whose lyrics I’d etched in my notebook in faux-calligraphy—and I wanted to save everything), but at some point I realized I couldn’t be hauling around all that baggage for the rest of my life. So I got rid of most of it in my twenties, and I’m not sorry. What remains of the years before I went out into the world is the last scrapbook I kept in high school throughout my final semester during the spring of 1998.

You have to know that there was nothing rarefied about the contents of my Anything Books. I would never suggest that I did not, in fact, copy out the lyrics to “My Heart Will Go On” and paste alongside them a poorly printed image of Jack and Rose from Titanic. My Anything Book also includes the ticket stub from when we went to see Spice World dressed up in costumes, but what I really draw your attention to is the quotation that I inscribed beside it in bright green marker:

“Gentle ladies, you will remember ‘till old age what we did together in our brilliant youth.”

Unlike many quote attributions, this one is legit. Sappho actually did write that, albeit in Greek, in 600 B.C. And it seems that the Internet agrees that Joan Baez really did say, “You don’t get to choose how you’re going to die or when. You can only decide how you’re going to live,” a quote that appears across from a photo of me clutching a bottle of beer and hugging my best friend Jennie, but which is otherwise devoid of context (and here the Internet offers no clues).

The next page’s offering is a quotation from Dag Hammarskjold, no less, “Life only demands from you the strength you possess. Only one feat—not to have run away.” I’ve partnered this with a photo from our school’s Valentines Day dance with not a hint of irony.

And then comes a few lines by Ayn Rand, because why not: “Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death, joy is not the absence of pain.” Followed, naturally, by the lyrics to “You Gotta Be,” by Des’ree:

“Listen as your day unfolds, challenge what the future holds, try and keep your head up to the sky/ Lovers, they may cause you tears, go ahead release your fears, stand up to be counted, don’t be ashamed to cry.”

It is easy to make fun of this, the earnestness, the sloppiness of patchwork, the ignorance of wider context—Ayn Rand, really? I was also really partial to being called on by John F. Kennedy in “defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger” which, I think, in the mid-’90s, was mostly an abstract idea. Tables of weights and measures these are not, though I don’t know that such tables would necessarily be more substantial. This stuff was data. I don’t think it’s entirely foolish to copy out the words to a song called “You Gotta Be” in order to learn how to be, which definitely seemed like the order of the hour.

In 1997, I printed out 10 pages of quotations, and gave them to my friends for Christmas. “These quotes are about friendship, togetherness, moving on, achieving great dreams, staying in touch, and being happy,” I wrote in my letter to them. The Sappho quote appears at the bottom of the first page, along with the lyrics to the Beatles’ “In My Life,” and a quote by Thoreau that I’d been obsessed with: “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams and live the life you’ve imagined.” (And no, Thoreau never said this, not exactly, no matter what Pinterest posts might say.)

 In 1997, the Internet was new enough that I could crib content from hideous websites that were an infinite scroll of friendship quotes, and new enough too that I wasn’t even embarrassed about copy-pasting these quotes in comic-sans. This was the era when you’d get emails about enlarging your penis straight to your inbox, when spam-filters hadn’t been invented yet, and “cyber” was a verb, though none of that was what I was thinking about when I included the lyrics to “The Times They Are A-Changing.”

Perhaps I should have spent more time on the Internet (1997 was the last year in which this sentence might be true) because I could have used it to find out who, exactly, had said, “Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”

Or maybe not, because while “cyber” was a verb, “Google” wasn’t, and perhaps the search engine of the day wouldn’t have been able to tell me that Anais Nin was being quoted here, something I only just figured out now. And I don’t think it would even have occurred to me then to wonder who’d authored that quote, to imagine an attribution could ever be as important as the fact of the words themselves, the inexplicable way in which they managed to be an articulation of my experience.

There is a legion of pithy writers whose names I only know because they belonged to attributed quotes in my Anything Book, names like Pam Brown, Sydney Smith, an awful lot of Kahil Gibran. Someone called Winston Abbott. Who was Winston Abbot? I have no idea, but Google reveals that he published a book in 1966 called Come Wander Among the Stars, and somehow on my own wanderings I came across a piece beginning, “Because you are a kindred spirit, come and stand beside me on this familiar hill.” It’s likely I copied this one from somebody else’s commonplace book. Another quote, “There is so much we still need to say, but how can we, after silent smiles meant so much more. The maze we travelled was deceiving yet friendships prevailed. Remember me and how lucky we were when life seems unfair. You will gain so much in life but never close your eyes to the memories.” A web search for this one comes up with nothing, absolutely nothing. (Which makes me afraid that I wrote it myself…)

A.A. Milne, Robert Frost, whoever it was that wrote about being an old woman and wearing purple (Jenny Joseph!), Maya Angelous’s “Phenomenal Woman.” Song lyrics by Joni Mitchell, David Foster (?), Billy Joel. The poem “If I Had My Life to Live Over,” whose attribution was another I never thought about, and I wasn’t the only one, because the saga of its mistaken authorship is decidedly long and winding:

In December 2005, Irish pop singer Bono, read in Spanish some of the lines of the poem on Mexican TV show Teletón México 2005 and attributed them to the "Chilean poet Borges.”)

I actually love this, the way a poem, or even a fragment of a poem (and even a fragment of a terrible poem) takes on a power and legs of its own. All of these pieces whirling through the cosmos, by which we try to make meaning, put on our finger on what exactly we’re all doing here. As the faux-Borges quoting Irish pop singer once wrote (and I’d later inscribe into my Anything Book in blue pen, alongside a photo of my bestie Britt and I wearing floral sheets at our friend Laura’s toga party, an occasion of which I have no recollection):

“I have climbed the highest mountains, I have run through the fields… But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.”

And I still haven’t, even though I’m more than 25 years older now, and I’ve read a lot of books, cover-to-cover, acquiring two English degrees, publishing four books of my own. I’ve even read Middlemarch, for fun (it was!), which I mention because I first encountered its author, George Eliot/Mary-Anne Evans, as credited to numerous quotes in my Anything Books, most of which were things she never wrote or said (among them, “Friendship is the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words”).

Middlemarch also matters because now I’m thinking about Edward Casaubon, a character from the novel, perhaps the greatest pompous blowhard in all of Western Literature. I’m thinking about his failed magnum opus, The Key to All Mythologies, and how Casaubon’s attempt to synthesize the universe would come to nothing. And how his project was the polar opposite of ours when we were yearning teenage girls in a bookless book club, copying poems and pop song lyrics into notebooks, creating understanding with fragments and worlds we could hold in our hands.

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Notes:

-My words are whirling through the cosmos, along with Pam Brown’s! I learned this recently when an image search revealed that a line from my second novel had been made into a page on QuoteFancy.com. And I really did write those words, not Mary-Anne Evans, or Borges, no matter what anybody says…

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