RE: commonplace books

from Anne Michaels, The Winter Vault

My mother kept a commonplace book, said Jean, a record of oddments she wished to remember: poems, quotations from books, the lyrics of songs, recipes (ice-water shortbread, cucumber and beet chutney, fish soup with verbena).  These yellow copybooks were also filled with cryptic phrases that I both longed to understand and was thrilled not to, their mystery increased their value for me.  They sat in a square stack, fifteen of them, on the corner of her writing table.  Only sometimes she dated her entries, and this I take to mean that my mother wanted to place a particular strand of thought, a loose thread of a quotation, next to a moment of particular personal potency, the here and now, say of 12 November 1926 at 3 p.m., when Keats made her feel the keenness of things, somehow marked her place int he world, marked a secret event I would never know.