Post 6- TJ on TS by LS

Thomas Jefferson places a single passage from Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy immediately after a quote taken from the Roman historian Livy, and immediately before a quote from Cicero. It is the unusual filling for an ancient Roman sandwich, bread inscribed with Latin. The placement of this passage, strange bedfellows and all, stands testament to the ways in which the Commonplace Book could organize information along linear paths reflective of the author’s life, over the creation of intentional modes of organization.

Finding Tristram Shandy in the midst of all this ancient Roman writing is very strange, but in that strangeness there is room to examine the historical value of the Commonplace Book as a means of learning about the people who read included texts, rather than learning about the texts themselves. In this case, Thomas Jefferson copied a section of Tristram Shandy dealing with death, and the fleeting nature of life (Jefferson 62). He did so between a segment of Cicero about free will, and a bit of Livy about honesty in the face of situations hostile to honesty (Jefferson 61-62). All of these passages have philosophical weight to them, and so are not entirely disparate, but their topical subjects do not provide any indication as to why Tristram Shandy would slotted here, of all places. This is a crucial observation, for it allows one to see a deeply personal subtext in this place.

In the Commonplace Book, when obvious implicit reason is abandoned, there is no way to know exactly what the author meant when copying the passages they did. However, in an inverting twist, this is part of what makes Commonplace Books so worth looking at. The circumstances dictating the connections between passages are a whim, or a coincidence, or anything but reason. And even if the arrangement is grounded in reason, it is a private reason. Against the apparent nonsense, we know one thing. He copied these words, and when he did he knew why. So we can feel his pulse in the space between these passages, even if we cannot see the blood.

Works Cited

Jefferson, Thomas, and Douglas L Wilson. Jefferson's Literary Commonplace Book. Princeton University Press, 1989.