Do You Want to See My Room? (April Commonplace Book)
Featuring a one-sided literary beef, but otherwise lots of nice things
Teenagers have the most fantastic bedrooms. You’ll be in a family’s house or apartment, which may be modest and may be grand, may be tasteful and maybe tacky. But it will be one thing, a single unified structure. Then you step over the threshold of the teenager’s room and it’s like walking into some magical fiefdom. You feel a need to blink, like you’ve walked out of the summer sun and into a candlelit church. I have always loved miniatures, stories-within-stories. These bedrooms, odd-one-out nooks, scratch the same itch. They’re uncanny in the literal, Freudian sense of unhomely, an alien appearance inside the domestic.
These rooms are gilded cages, beautiful and weird because their inhabitants are old enough to know what they like but too young to shape their lives around that knowledge. What they have is their little square of space, which assumes a talismanic status: it’s an externalization of the person they are hoping to be. Grownup bedrooms are usually uninteresting, because grownups get to make their own choices and to decorate their own homes (or to collaborate on it as equals with partners and roommates).
I always shared a bedroom as a kid, so my fiefdom was more of a democracy. What I had instead, though, was a series of ridiculously heavy and somber-looking leather-bound notebooks. At one point I misplaced one of these notebooks somewhere in my high school. Luckily, I’d written my name and phone number inside the front cover. A school administrator found me at lunch. “We found your bible,” she said. My bible??? But she was kind of right. Into these biblical tomes went absolutely everything. I copied out, longhand, passages from books. I drafted my own stories and essays. I pasted in clippings from magazines, paint chips, notes from friends, whatever came my way. It was, I guess, what people call a “commonplace book,” an all-purpose receptacle of a notebook.
Gradually, I lost the habit of keeping these commonplace books. I got an iPhone and a computer, which meant I was doing more reading on a screen. And the rest of the world had gone digital, too. It’s hard to make a clipping of an online-only magazine. I was doing a lot of surreptitious onscreen reading (at work), and pulling out a big, overspilling notebook in the office felt like it would be unduly conspicuous. And in any case I wasn’t a teenager any longer, and didn’t need to focus my energies in these narrow ways. There was no weird threshold between my personal realm and the wider world.
Still, I’ve missed that feeling of collaging and collecting. I worry that my reading life has gotten too passive, without all the copying, the record-keeping, the involved annotations and illustrations, the play of contrasting two unrelated passages simply because they happened to get scribbled on two corners of the same page. So I’m starting a series right here, opening my hermetic teenage habits to all of you (well, the ones who pay: I’m not letting just anyone read my diary).
April commonplace book below.
