Essays Free read
On Keeping a Commonplace Book
Before the algorithm decided what we should remember, we kept the decision ourselves, in ink, by hand.
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A commonplace book is a private anthology — the passages, lines and stray facts a reader thought worth keeping. For four centuries it was how educated people thought. We have outsourced it to machines that keep everything and therefore value nothing.
What follows is less an argument than an act of attention — the deliberate, slightly old-fashioned business of looking at one thing for longer than is strictly efficient.
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