My Commonplace Book entries came from a variety of sources, ranging from philosophical quotes, to songs, photos, paintings, poems, and passages from some of my favorite books. Of course, having chosen them as the topics of my entries, I already had an appreciation for these things from when I first ran into them, but I …
Category Archives: Commonplace
Commonplace 10
These are some of the lyrics to the song Waterloo from the band ABBA: one of my favorite songs from one of my favorite bands. The whole song is an extended metaphor using Napoleon’s final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo as an example of how a person has been overcome by a lover’s advances …
Commonplace 9
I saw a video about populism that used this quote in relation to how news organizations can present the same event using different language in order to reinforce the opinions of their target audience. What Michel de Montaigne is essentially saying here is that falsehoods come in several forms, varying in the degree of separation …
Commonplace 8
I find this quote to be especially powerful because I, like many people, often find myself concerned about things that I can’t control, even if they don’t affect me in any meaningful way. Even the most powerful people on earth (that is to say, not freshmen students at college) have a limit to what they …
Commonplace 7
Reading this out loud is surprisingly difficult, even for a native English speaker like myself. Of course, there are reasons why the language’s spelling and pronunciations can be completely arbitrary: many of the words have been inherited from other languages, with in turn their own messy rules on how to write and speak. I know …
Commonplace 6
A Thousand Plateaus is a book about the link between capitalism and “schizoanalysis,” better known as nomadology: the tendency to cherry-pick and endorse certain ideas from political ideologies while leaving the rest behind. Part of Deleuze’s argument is that capitalism, and thus society at large, continues to exist in part because of our willingness to …
Commonplace 5
This is a photo from 1913 of the painting Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on November 16, 1581 by Ilya Repin, after a modernist critic slashed at the canvas with a knife as protest for its artistic style. Although the painting was fully restored, and this was neither the vision of the artist …
Commonplace 4
Commonplace 3
A death poem found in David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, which I read for a Problem of God class. This poem is recited by one of the characters as evidence for his case that there is no justice or mercy in the universe: death stands triumphant over the suffering masses, yet refuses to deliver …
Commonplace 2
I took a screenshot of this quote, which was from an article about conspiracy groups and how they function. The context for this in particular was a section in which the author wrote about how any conspiracy relies on linking disparate events together, to further suit the larger conspiratorial narrative. People instinctively try to find …
