This excerpt from The Remains of the Corps explains how Kenneth felt about his use of a commonplace book:
The ritual of immersing himself in his literary commonplace book was like taking a deep breath of fresh air on a brisk spring morning. The galleried entries, individually and as a composite, served, among other things, as his written memory, his moral compass, his character trait checklist, and his lifeline to normalcy. While other people collected coins, stamps, bottles, and such, he amassed a treasure trove of resonant words — in silken phrases, in silver sentences, in lustrous expressions, in lyrics of gold, in luminous quotations, and in quicksilvery passages masterfully constructed — and re-examined them time and again. Gleaning, preserving, and annotating in a single, accessible place, snippets of memorable quality had become an essential and transformative component of his reading adventures. He had maintained and cherished his compendiums since freshman year in high school and his distinctly personal fund of notable knowledge had grown to many volumes. So attached was he to his commonplace book — he didn’t know why they called it that as its content was anything but and keepers of commonplace books, such as Aristotle, Erasmus, and Jefferson were hardly commonplace figures — that before leaving for the Marines, he had distilled years of collected materials to one compact volume that included those entries he thought would be most relevant to the life he was to lead in the Marines. They would serve as a source of strength to draw upon, a barrier to weakness, an antidote to anxiety, a pleasurable oasis of respite to preserve sanity, and a ready stock of practical insight, wisdom, and understanding to apply to circumstances he hadn’t confronted before. The contents were much like an orchestra playing his favorite songs. The poetry was a soothing stringed instrument. The quotations were bugle blasts — calls to action. The humor was a playful fiddle. The principles evoked by the literary passages, which he had made his own, were the drumbeats to which he marched. He sometimes, especially when he descended into a brown study, would run his fingers over the words as he revisited them, and he swore that the inspiration he drew from those moments was palpable.