Keeping Book: V. 1
A virtual commonplace book. (1)
Commonplace books have been kept for centuries as a collection of quotes that are often categorized by topic. I prefer categorizing my commonplace books chronologically, as a kind of favorite lines from the books I’ve read each month. In this virtual commonplace book, I will update each “volume” for every 5 works I read, sharing the passages that I have loved and pondered since reading.
They neglect the love of God, which is the true end.
“I’ve tried to make God the end of all my thoughts and desires, as the target at which they all are aimed and should end.”
This, to me, is the actual presence of God. It is a habitual, silent, and secret conversation of the soul.
And if the ship of our soul is ever tossed by storms, then we should awake the Lord who sleeps in it and He will quickly calm the sea.
God won’t allow a soul that desires complete devotion to Him to be consumed by anything but Him.
Let’s stay in His holy presence by praising Him, desiring Him, submitting to Him, thanking Him, and by every other way which our spirits can invent.
So let’s live and die with God.
We must know before we can love. And in order to know God, we must often think of Him.
He often sends diseases of the body to cure diseases of the soul, so take comfort that we have a sovereign Physician of both the body and the soul.
May we make our lies about knowing God. The more we know Him, the more we want to know Him. And because we usually measure our love for something by how much we know it, the deeper we know God, the greater our love for Him.
The best way to prove our trust and faithfulness to God is to find our joy not in things created but in the Creator.
A standard fact about the male human: he will usually slouch to meet a woman’s disapproval and grow to meet her praise.
You want her to look at the Enemy and say exactly the same thing that she says to hubby: Until You please me, I will not praise you. Until You make my life easier, I will not give thanks. Until You give me joy, I will not be so dishonest as to sing a psalm.
Calling sin “sin” is deplorably freeing to both the sinner and the sinned against.
One last thing: encourage nonspecific requests whenever possible. With these, the humans never have to wrestle with why the Enemy said no, and they’ll always wonder if He’s ever said yes. They’ll never trust a beam that hasn’t held their weight before. And as long as they never test its weight by standing on it, the beam will always remain untrustworthy.
In the Enemy’s view of friendship, the women reach for Him and get friendship thrown in. Instead, we want these women to reach for friendship and get neither.
The Enemy is always trying to bring the creatures back to just the one moment, just the one day, just the one afternoon. He tells them to ask for their “daily” bread. He wants them to trust Him for the very air in their lungs and the clothes on their backs, and His intangible aid is usually sent in ration packets that are frequent but small.
Whenever a patient is in transition, we take advantage of it to shut down their productivity and gum up the works of their prayer. When they know a big change is coming (a move, a new job, a wedding, a baby, a church plant), they can be brought to waste many months refusing to engage with the current reality because they know another reality is on its way.
They saw her secret, in the end: she actually believed what she was saying all this long while.
*I listened to this book on audio, so I sadly did not collect any quotes.
*I began reading this book around two years ago, but never finished the last two chapters. The quotes below are just my favorites from those last chapters.
One of the ways we bear the image of a Creator God is that we are compelled to create.
Write that song. Write that story. Homesickness is the way home.
I want you, dear reader, to remember that one holy way of mending the world is to sing, to write, to paint, to weave new worlds. Because the seed of you feeble-yet-faithful work fell to the ground, died, and rose again, what Christ has done through you will call forth praise from lonesome travelers long after your name is forgotten. They will know someone lived and loved here. Whoever they were, they will think, they belonged to God. It’s clear that they believed the stories of Jesus were true, and it gave them a hope that made their lives beautiful in ways that will unfold for ages among the linnea that shimmers in the moonlit woods.
And until the Kingdom comes in its fullness, bend your will to the joyful, tearful telling of its coming. Write about that.
In making contact with a work of art nothing serves so ill as words of criticism: the invariable result is more or less happy misunderstandings.
Discover the motive that bids you write; examine whether it sends its roots down to the deepest places of your heart, confess to yourself whether you would have to die if writing were denied you. This before all: ask yourself in the quietest hour of your night: must I write? Dig down into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be in the affirmative, if you may meet this solemn question with a strong and simple “I must”, then build your life according to this necessity.
A work of art is good if it has grown out of necessity.
Live for a while in these books, learn from them what seems to you worth learning, but above all love them.
To be an artist means: not to reckon and count; to ripen like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of Spring without fear lest no Summer might come after. It does come. But it comes only to the patient ones, who are there as if eternity lay in front of them, so unconcernedly still and far.
I am glad to know my books are in your hands.
You are so young, you have not even begun, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that is unsolved in your heart and to try to cherish the questions themselves, like closed rooms and like books written in a very strange tongue. Do not search now for the answers which cannot be given you because you could not live them. It is a matter of living everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, one distant day live right into the answer.
—What entitles you then to miss, as if he had passed away, and to seek, as if he were lost, someone who has never been?
Why do you not think that he who draws near from all eternity is still to come, that he is in the future, the final fruit of a tree whose leaves we are? What prevents you from throwing forward his truth into times yet to be, and living your life as a painful and beautiful day in the history of a great gestation? Do you not see, then, how everything that happens is for ever a beginning, and might it not be His beginning, since beginning is in itself always so beautiful? If he is the most perfect, must not the inferior precede him, that he may choose himself out of abundance and profusion?—Must he not be the last, in order to embrace everything within himself, and what sense should we have if he for whom we crave had already been? As bees collect honey, so we take what is sweetest out of everything and build Him.
To love is also good: for love is difficult.
Therefore young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot know love yet: they have to learn it. With their whole being, with all their strength gathered about their lonely, fearful, upward beating heart, they must learn to love.
So each one loses himself for the other’s sake, and loses the other and many others who wanted still to come.
How could we forget those old myths which are to be found in the beginnings of every people; the myths of the dragons which are transformed, at the last moment, into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our life are princesses, who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrifying is at bottom of the helplessness that seeks our help.
So you must not be frightened, dear Herr Kappus, when a sorrow rises up before you, greater than you have ever seen before; when a restlessness like light and cloud shadows passes over your hands and over all your doing. You must think that something is happening upon you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall.
Do you remember how this life has longed ever since childhood for the “great”? I see how it is now longing to leave the great for greater. Therefore it does not cease to be difficult, but therefore it will not cease, either, to grow.
For my full thoughts on these books, look forward to my monthly reading wrap ups!
(1) An English teacher from high school used to call our required commonplace books “keeping books,” which I found lovely.
(2) This book is written in the style of The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis, from the perspective of a demon to a female “patient,” which is a helpful note to understanding some of these twisted lines.
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