CMP Review 2025-11-13

November 13, 2025

January will mark my eight-year anniversary of keeping a commonplace book. I have written down a wide variety of quotations from the many books I have read, and in some way my commonplace is a journal of my reading. But in a more specific way, it is a journal of my reading of Shakespeare.

As my family has read together two or three plays per year, I have been struck again and again by some line that speaks to some struggle or challenge in my life at the time. It doesn’t matter what play or what season of life. There always seems to be something.

On Saturday I wrote down this line from Measure for Measure:

Our doubts are traitors
And make us lose the good we oft might win
By fearing to attempt.

Many times I have hesitated to undertake a project when I didn’t have a near certainty of success. I had a fear of failure, a fear of wasted time, a fear of resources drained with nothing to show.

But I see that these doubts are traitors. Armed with a new insight and a new quotation, I take a new step forward with my commonplace at my side.

@artmiddlekauff