Commonplaces

Ever since I came across W.H. Auden's commonplace book, the name of which I forget, I've been collecting extracts that appeal to me in one way or another. It's the most impersonal, and knowing, form of autobiography there is, and a blog, which is also impersonal and knowing, seems a good place to store/expose it. So I'll start with one that feels particularly apposite at the moment. It comes from Under My Skin, by Doris Lessing:

... it is a commonplace of sociology and psychology that a group anywhere, no matter what its first inspiration, political, literary, even criminal, tends in the end to become ‘religious’ ...

Fortuitous errors

In the following line from, I think, Letters from Iceland, 'And the ports have names for the sea', Auden originally wrote 'poets', but preferred the printer's error and left it as it was.

Similarly, in the previous post, I intended to say 'home-made wine', but actually typed 'hole-made wine'. This captures the flavour, foetid, unsunned, acidic, of the stuff so perfectly I'm going to take a leaf from Auden's book.