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Current ACC students enrolled in my classes can visit the Handouts page on this website to find electronic versions of all of the handouts for our class.  These materials are accessible only for students enrolled in my classes during the current semester or session.  In the menu bar at the top of this website, click on or tap the menu item Handouts (or on smaller screens click on or tap the Collapsed Menu Icon —  the three horizontal lines — to reveal the menu of this website's pages.)

Does Mr. Dettmer publish essays periodically on this website?

Yes . . . he does!  (Well, he will — the first is coming later this year.  But please don't call them a blog.)

The happiness of a commonplace book —

In his now well-anthologized letter of December 10, 1513 to his friend Francesco Vettori, Niccolò Macchiavelli relates his happiness engaging in conversation with others ("the ancients") through his study of the books in his private library.  (Machiavelli was a Florentine statesman and political philosopher who had recently been arrested, tortured, and then exiled in the months after a regime change in Florence in which the Medici faction had removed the head of the republican government of Florence, Pietro Sodorini, with whom Machiavelli was closely associated.  Vettori was at that time the Florentine ambassador to the Supreme Pontiff [that is, the Pope] in Rome.)

On November 23, 1513 Vettori had written a friendly letter to Machiavelli in which he describes a typical day for him in Rome — a brief meeting with the Supreme Pontiff (the Pope), numerous meetings with the highest ranking cardinals and other ecclesiastical leaders, and movements in and about the palaces and gardens and splendor of sixteenth-century Vatican City.  The exiled Machiavelli responded mimetically to his friend, with humor, describing a typical day for him, which would include puttering around his small property, a farm, in Sant'Andra in Percussina just outside of Florence and interacting closely with the rustics who labored on it before walking down to the inn in the local village, where he would absorb himself in the vulgar ways of his surroundings, engaging in gossip and news about the villages and jousting in good-natured arguments about common games played with the locals.  But as the days would come to an end, he would return to his farm and retire to his library to absorb himself in a much different way.  He writes,

When evening comes, I return home and enter my study; on the threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and put on the garments of court and palace.  Fitted out appropriately, I step inside the venerable courts of the ancients, where, solicitously received by them, I nourish myself on that food that alone is mine and for which I was born; where I am unashamed to converse with them and to question them about the motives for their actions, and they, out of their human kindness, answer me.  And for four hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death.  I absorb myself into them completely.

Libraries are alive with ideas and conversation.  They are a place of intense activity — a shared activity, even though those with whom one shares it may be long deceased.  They have great value for those who understand how to use them and how to appreciate the potential they hold.  They are timeless because they span all time.

Frequently there are ideas expressed in the texts one encounters that are worth remembering for further thought and reflection — for their depth, for their complexity, for their disruptiveness, or for the beauty of their expression.  Developed long before the advent of electronic texts and direct searches, a "commonplace book" is a time-honored practice of copying out by hand interesting or favored quotations from the books in one's library into a notebook of some sort, and then noting the author and source of the quotation.  Oftentimes keepers of a commonplace book annotate their entries, to record their thoughts on the disquisitions of the authors whose works they have read, thereby engaging in a conversation with them.  Here on my website I maintain a commonplace book of my own.  It is in its beginning stages, and growing as I add to it.

To peruse my commonplace book, see the Commonplace Book page on this website.