A dip into my commonplace diary

One of the places I go when I'm uninspired

Hey y’all,

When I’m uninspired, I open up my commonplace diary. Let’s have a look together and see if we can find anything good in there:

As you can see, a commonplace entry can come from anywhere — from a 90s sitcom to an inspirational quote I cut out of my neighborhood newspaper.

One of the reasons I like keeping the commonplace diary is that when you put words down on a page, even randomly, they seem to start talking to each other.

Here’s the entire Sally Mann quote from Hold Still:

I tried to remain flexible and open to the vagaries of chance; like Napoleon, I figured that luck, aesthetic luck included, is just the ability to exploit accidents. I grew to welcome the ripply flaws caused by a breeze or tiny mote of dust, which ideally would settle right where I needed a comet-like streak, or the emulsion the peeled away from the plate in the corner where I hadn’t liked that telephone line anyway. Unlike the young narrator in Swann’s Way praying for the angel of certainty to visit him in his bedroom, I found myself praying for the angel of uncertainty. And many times she visited my plates, bestowing upon them essential peculiarities, persuasive consequence, intrigue, drama, and allegory.

Which seems to me to harmonize beautifully with Hans Zimmer’s advice to musicians:

I think you have to have a lot of courage and a certain amount of foolishness to want to become a musician. You have to be completely and utterly insane and passionate at the same time, because to make a living as a musician is very difficult. On the other hand, to live a playful life, the way a musician does, is maybe not that difficult and maybe not such a bad idea. But you don’t have to be a musician to have the joys of a musician because it’s not about how well we play; it’s how well we listen. It’s also terribly important to know that there has to be humour in music. One of the things you learn very quickly is how to really quickly turn a wrong note into something glorious. You use that note and you twist everything around it and suddenly the wrong note is a new note. The whole piece is transformed and it works. So there is no such thing as a mistake. The only mistake is to not play with conviction and playfulness. So play with courage, play with conviction, play with joy. Joy is vastly underrated in life these days.

I have no idea who Nelson Henderson is, by the way — that aphorism seems to have many sources. One I can verify is from Quaker philosopher Elton Trueblood’s 1951 book, The Life We Prize:

“A man has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human life when he plants shade trees under which he knows full well he will never sit.”

Misattribution is one of the perils of plucking quotes from random places.

Let’s turn back a page: