[ recap ]
Last week we looked at what survives: the termination of @contemporary.blueprint, seven problems that keep coming round, and archives that outlive accounts.
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[ thoughts ]
I opened the reading list this week and found a book I have no memory of saving.
Information Theory and Esthetic Perception, by Abraham Moles, which applies Claude Shannon's information theory to how a person perceives a piece of music, originally published in French in 1958 and in English eight years later.
I found it filed under Cybernetics and Systems, the last of five headings I made up as I went, alongside Taste, Aesthetics, Craft and Making, and Image and Media.
Then I scrolled. A few hundred entries, and I could not tell you why most of them are there (perhaps I'll share my full list one day).
The list is a commonplace book, and the headings are the commonplaces. Commonplace is a literal translation of the Greek koinoi topoi, which became loci communes in Latin, the common places you file things under.
The Dutch scholar Erasmus set out the method in De Copia in 1512. Sort your headings first, then, as he put it, "whatever you come across anywhere, mark it down in its proper place."
Typical headings were honour, virtue, beauty, friendship. Four hundred years later, mine sort by medium and by system.
For the next two centuries this was how educated people read, and Oxford taught it.
The poet John Milton kept one, filling it with excerpts from upwards of eighty authors in English, French, Italian, Latin and Greek.
John Locke started his at Oxford in 1652 and spent twenty-five years on the problem I have never solved, which is where to put things. His answer was a two-page index. Take the keyword, take its first letter and the first vowel after it, and that pair gives you the page. Under EPISTOLA you look up E and I.
All of that solves finding things, none of it explains why Abraham Moles is in my file.
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[ creativity ]
In an essay called "On Keeping a Notebook", collected in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion went back through her own notebooks to work out what they were for.
One entry reads: That woman Estelle is partly the reason why George Sharp and I are separated today. Under it, in her shorthand: dirty crepe-de-Chine wrapper, hotel bar, Wilmington RR, 9:45 a.m. August Monday morning.
She studies it for a long while and cannot place it. A bar across from the railway station in Wilmington, Delaware, on a Monday morning in August. Waiting for a train, or missing one. 1960, or 1961. She isn't sure why Wilmington.
Then it comes back. The woman had come down from her room for a beer, and the bartender had heard the story before.
The point of the notebook, she says, was never "an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking." She had given up that kind of entry years earlier. What she kept instead she calls "bits of the mind's string too short to use," and however faithfully she recorded what was around her, the common denominator was always the implacable "I."
Her phrase for what that buys you is to "keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be," whether or not we find them good company. Otherwise, she writes, they turn up unannounced and hammer on the mind's door at four in the morning, demanding to know who deserted them.
She could get that morning back because she had written down what the room felt like.
For me, there is a link next to Abraham Moles and nothing else.
The German sociologist Niklas Luhmann started a box of index cards around 1951, while working as a civil servant. By the time he died in 1998 it held approximately 90,000 handwritten note cards, maintained between 1951 and 1996. One idea per card, written in his own words. A number, so any card could point at any other. Links recorded at the moment of filing, which meant deciding then and there where the thought belonged.
In 1981 he wrote a paper about it, "Kommunikation mit Zettelkästen", and called the box a communication partner. His argument was that "the partners can mutually surprise each other" is one of the basic conditions of communication. The box surprised him, throwing up connections between cards he had filed decades apart and forgotten. Bielefeld University, which holds the estate, calls the collection his intellectual autobiography, and the cards are digitised, so you can click through them.
Ask a language model something and an answer arrives you did not expect.
What surprised Luhmann was a card in his own handwriting, holding a judgement he no longer remembered making.
Nothing in a model's answer was chosen by you, so the surprise it gives you belongs to somebody else.
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[ making ]
Luhmann's claim in that essay is blunt: it is impossible to think without writing, at least in any sophisticated or networked fashion.
He is describing the labour. Ninety thousand cards, each one written by hand, is what he means by thinking.
The German critic Walter Benjamin started collecting in Paris in 1927, working in the Bibliothèque Nationale on the covered iron-and-glass arcades of the previous century.
The material became a montage of quotations from hundreds of sources, arranged in thirty-six categories with rubrics like Fashion, Boredom, Dream City, Photography and Theory of Progress.
Over thirteen years the proportions changed.
The quotations were worked into the montage until they far outnumbered the commentaries, and Benjamin's own voice thinned out between them. He meant it to. The work had to develop the art of citing without quotation marks, and, more plainly, "Method of this project: literary montage. I needn't say anything. Merely show."
Erasmus copied the passage out by hand.
Didion wrote down what the room felt like.
Luhmann rewrote the idea in his own words and said where it connected.
Each of them put the material through a person before it counted as collected.
Farnam Street treats the commonplace book as a working practice rather than a filing system.
The Zettelkasten forums, named after Luhmann's slip box, have rebuilt his numbering and linking rules into a method anyone can follow.
Obsidian keeps your notes as plain Markdown files in a folder on your own machine, requires no account, and makes no network requests by default. Any text editor opens them. After last week, I have a specific interest in files that do not live inside somebody else's account.
Back in week 36 I created and shared Milieu, a free Obsidian vault set up for noticing, writing and connecting your thoughts.
It has three practices in it: Morning Pages, Four-Square, and Notes for whatever catches your attention. Every entry links itself as you write, so after a few weeks you can open one view and see what keeps returning.
It runs on a laptop or desktop. I tried to make a mobile version work and could not get it good enough to share.
Luhmann did the linking by hand, across ninety thousand cards. The software does it for you, which is a real gift and also the trap, because the linking was never the work.
I am starting with Abraham Moles.
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