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[Back to index of February articles] BEARINGS: By Martin Smith I was educated in the shadow of Worcester cathedral in a school that Henry VIII created out of the monastic school that had existed there since Saxon times. History seemed very close. We could crawl through a coal cellar into the charnel house where the bones of Saxon monks were stored after their graves had been dug up in the Middle Ages to make room for the Lady Chapel. Another relic took us even further back into the Dark Ages. Viking pirates repeatedly raided the priory. Eventually the monks captured a marauder, tanned his skin, and nailed it to the library door as a hideous deterrent to future raiders. After almost a thousand years, a large piece still remained on view in the cathedral. My own love of books gave me just a bit of sympathy with the frantic monks. Repeated burglaries are very traumatic and can drive victims to take desperate measures. In the end, it was the library that the monks valued most, not precious ornaments from the church. It was a matter of life and death for civilization itself. The passing on of the accumulated wisdom of the ages was in their hands. Anything thieves could take could be replaced - except books. I was musing about this recently as I considered how devastating it would be to lose the notebooks I have kept from my reading over the last four decades. Let me explain what they mean to me. I have always been aware of the way that the impressions we receive while reading can be very fleeting, so I decided to adopt a remedy that goes back to ancient times. The Greeks and Romans thought of memory in terms of places in the mind in which data was stored thematically. (The Greek for place is topos and that's why we speak of "topics.") Disciplined readers memorized by copying down extracts from the books they read. The notebooks into which they copied the quotations were called 'commonplace books' because you always consult these notebooks to find apt quotations which had the same theme in common. The result was a copious or fluent style of speaking and writing. (From this usage, we get the English word 'copy'! If you wanted to learn how to speak copiously, you needed first to copy down writing that had spoken to you.) The trick is not to self-consciously 'take notes' from a book, but simply to trust impulse and intuition. Whenever you read something that strikes you, copy it down in your own handwriting into a notebook exclusively dedicated to this purpose. Imagine a journal in which you don't write your own musings, but you do copy down quotations from any and every source as you read. Don't even analyze why you think it is striking. Don't censor yourself. Write one line or three pages, whatever it calls for. And don't be afraid to mix your sources up. I can open my notebooks and on two facing pages there might be a poem, a graffito copied from an underpass wall, a snippet from the leading article of the newspaper, a passage from one of the mystics, the lyric of a song. The act of copying these quotations in your own handwriting is a way of making them your own. In this labor of love, you are preparing them as ingredients in the recipes of your own soul work. This method soon reveals to you how active your soul is during your reading. At every stage of our life, month by month, our hearts and souls are hungry for nourishment and illumination. Subconsciously we know what we need, even if consciously we are not fully aware of it. So as we read - whether it is a novel, the Bible, the newspaper, a book on prayer - our hearts are scanning the pages more avidly than our conscious minds. When we have an 'aha!' moment and conscientiously copy down the passage that has triggered it, we are responding to our own interior needs. Now, I can turn back to these notebooks and find all sorts of riches clustered together. In retrospect I can tell why they resonated at that time. At this time, see how I was struggling with the challenges of being emotionally honest; half the quotations I noted down speak to that theme. In another time, I now realize how much my heart was picking up from my reading about loneliness, and at another about letting go. In some ways these notebooks throw more light on the unfolding of my inner life than any journal I might have written. And they keep alive in my memory literally hundreds and hundreds of books that I have read over the years, and enable me to feed again from their wisdom and pass it on to others. Why not give this method a try? I recommend it highly. [Back to index of February articles]
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