Keep What Is Good

Erin Doom

Sep 13

4 min read

Updated: Sep 22

Why Keep a Commonplace Book?

Forefeast of the Exaltation of the Venerable & Life-Giving Cross

Anno Domini 2026, September 13

We live amid an abundance of words and a poverty of attention.

A sentence arrests us. A passage opens something we had not been able to name. A line from a poem, a word from one of the Fathers, an image from a novel, or a remark made across the table suddenly seems worth keeping.

But then we move on.

The page turns. The conversation ends. Another notification appears. What briefly stood before us with startling clarity disappears into the ceaseless stream of things encountered and forgotten.

A commonplace book begins with a small act of resistance: this is worth keeping.

For centuries, readers have copied passages, sayings, observations, prayers, questions, and ideas into books of their own. These collections came to be called commonplace books—not because what they contained was ordinary or trivial, but because they gathered material under shared places: friendship, courage, death, beauty, suffering, home, prayer, education, love.

A commonplace book is not quite a journal. It's not really meant to record the events or emotions of each day. It's not a planner designed to manage what comes next. And it's not merely a notebook filled with hurried information.

Instead, it's a place to gather what matters.

Reading With Attention

To copy a passage by hand is to encounter it differently.

The hand moves more slowly than the eye. It cannot race across the page. It must linger over each word, attend to the shape of the sentence, and decide where the emphasis falls. Copying creates a small interval between encountering something and moving beyond it.

That interval is a form of attention.

The purpose is not to collect quotations for display. A commonplace book can become another possession, another archive, another pile of material never revisited. The practice becomes fruitful only when gathering gives way to remembering—and remembering begins to shape the way we live.

“What we behold” is not merely what passes before our eyes. It is what we allow to remain before us.

We return to the passage. We place it beside another. We notice an unexpected correspondence between St. Basil and Wendell Berry, between Homer and a conversation with a friend, between something written centuries ago and the struggle waiting for us this morning.

Over time, the book becomes more than a record of what we have read. It becomes a record of what has claimed our attention.

A Book Made by a Life

Continue the Journey

Read more: The Bibliotheka

Follow the weekly rhythm: Dr. Doom’s Commonplace and Dr. Doom’s Patristic Word

Go deeper: Podvig Letters and Membership

Read more: The Bibliotheka

Follow the weekly rhythm: Dr. Doom’s Commonplace and Dr. Doom’s Patristic Word

Go deeper: Podvig Letters and Membership

No two commonplace books should be alike.

One may contain lines from Scripture and the Fathers. Another may gather poems, recipes, family sayings, historical dates, sketches, questions, training principles, or observations made while walking through the neighborhood. A single page may place Marcus Aurelius beside St. Ephrem, a sentence from Dostoevsky beside something a child said at breakfast.

The unity comes from the person keeping it.

This is why a commonplace book is not simply a collection. It is a meeting place. Words written by other people enter into conversation with one another—and with the life of the reader.

The book grows slowly because a life grows slowly.

Its pages acquire underlining, corrections, cross-references, fingerprints, and coffee stains. Themes emerge that we did not set out to create. Certain questions return. Certain voices become companions. What seemed unrelated begins to reveal a pattern.

Years later, opening the book may restore something we did not know we had lost: a former question, an abandoned resolve, a sentence that once gave us courage, a poem once memorized, or a word we have finally become ready to understand.

How to Begin

Begin simply.

When you encounter something worth keeping, write it down. Copy the words accurately. Record where they came from. Add a date or a heading if it will help you find the passage again.

Then leave enough room for a response.

Why did these words stop you? What do they illuminate? What do they ask of you? What other passage do they recall? Is there something here to practice?

You don't need an elaborate system. You don't need to fill pages quickly. A commonplace book is not another instrument for measuring productivity. Its value does not depend upon how much it contains.

One passage kept with attention is better than twenty copied in haste.

Return occasionally. Read backward. Add a note beside an older entry. Create an index as themes begin to emerge. Allow passages copied months or years apart to find one another.

Most importantly, allow them to address you.

From Beholding to Becoming

The Christian life is shaped by remembrance.

“Test all things,” St. Paul writes. “Hold fast what is good.”

Keeping is not passive. To hold fast is to refuse to let something worthy be carried away by distraction, forgetfulness, or the pressure of the next task or duty. It is to receive a word, preserve it, and remain near it long enough for it to bear fruit.

This is the deeper purpose of the commonplace book.

We behold something true, good, or beautiful. We preserve it through the practice of attention. We return to it until it begins to enter our memory, our habits, our speech, and our way of seeing.

Behold. Practice. Become.

A commonplace book belongs within that movement. It stands between encounter and embodiment—between the word that arrests us and the life that might one day be changed by it.

It will not remember for us. It cannot practice for us. But it gives what is good a place to remain while we learn how to remain with it.

Read with attention.

Keep what is good.

Keep your own commonplace—explore Founding Membership →