A commonplace book is what a provident poet cannot subsist without, for this proverbial, reason, that "great wits have short memories;" and whereas, on the other hand, poets, being liars by profession, ought to have good memories; to reconcile these, a book of this sort, is in the nature of a supplemental memory, or a record of what occurs remarkable in every day's reading or conversation. There you enter not only your own original thoughts, (which, a hundred to one, are few and insignificant) but such of other men, as you think fit to make your own, by entering them there. For, take this for a rule, when an author is in your books, you have the same demand upon him for his wit, as a merchant has for your money, when you are in his. By these few and easy prescriptions, (with the help of a good genius) it is possible you may, in a short time, arrive at the accomplishments of a poet, and shine in that character[3].

“Don’t buy into your myth.”

When he was coming up as a writer, the author and journalist Rex Murphy would write out longhand favorite poems and passages. He was asked, what’s that done for you? “There’s an energy attached to poetry and great prose,” Murphy said. “And when you bring it into your mind, into your living sensibility, by some weird osmosis, it lifts your style or the attempts of your mind.” When you read great writing, when you write down a great line or paragraph, Murphy continues, “somehow or another, it contaminates you in a rich way. You get something from it—from this osmotic imitation—that will only take place if you lodge it in your consciousness.”

David Brooks talks about what he calls the “theory of maximum taste.” It’s similar to what Murphy is saying. “Exposure to genius has the power to expand your consciousness,” Brooks writes. “If you spend a lot of time with genius, your mind will end up bigger and broader than if you [don’t].”

For example, I recently read about how Lin-Manuel Miranda tells the same story dozens of times to the same person because he forgets who he already told. Once, when he finished telling his collaborator Tommy Kail a story, Kail said, “That happened to me. I told you that.” They both laughed then Kail added, “That’s why you’re cut out for theater, because you’ll tell it like it’s the first time.” So in the margin I wrote, LIKE IT’S THE FIRST TIME:

Randall Stutman, an executive advisor and prolific note-taker, says, “collecting insights is just the preamble to what really matters: reviewing, with some level of consistency, those insights. You have to routinely make those insights available to yourself.” “Wisdom is only wisdom if you can act on it,” Randall says. “In the review process, you’re making those insights available for your mind to act on.”

The novelist and screenwriter Raymond Chandler said he avoided reading books written by someone who didn’t “take the pains” to write out the words. (It used to be common for writers to dictate into a recorder then have an assistant transcribe those words.) “You have to have that mechanical resistance,” Chandler wrote in a 1949 letter to actor/writer Alex Barris. “When you have to use your energy to put those words down, you are more apt to make them count.”

"If the Reagans' home in Palisades (Calif.) were burning," Brinkley says, "this would be one of the things Reagan would immediately drag out of the house. He carried them with him all over like a carpenter brings their tools. These were the tools for his trade."

It's not an exaggeration: Nearly every dollar I've made in my adult life was earned first on the back or front (or both) of an index card.Everything I do, I do on index cards.

I just loved the blues. It was the real thing. I kinda always figured I was the real thing too."

A recent writer has called attention to apassage in Paxson's presidential address before the American Historical Associationin 1938, in which he remarked that historians "needed Cheyney's warning . . . not towrite in 1917 or 1918 what might be regretted in 1927 and 1928."

I am not much like Turner ; but I believe that I am like him in that Iam aware that in history you cannot prove an inference. You cannotprove causation, much as you crave to do it. You may present sequencesof events, whose relationship suggests a link-up of cause and consequence ;

The Verdict of History," he scrawled on anote : "There is none — . . . Apart from verif of facts There is noverdict only onesided testimony." "

"Say what one may of historical philos-ophy," he wrote in 1926, "history is a matter of facts; and theestablishment of facts, desiccated as they may be, is the chief func-tion of the genuine historian."

"Do not take out of a secondarywork a paragraph or its substance and incorporate it in your work. . . . Use it if youmust, but restate it in your own terms, and make its form entirely yours. Give thefootnote of course but remember that you must be the author."

the author must not merely articulate his sources; he mustdigest them. A long passage quoted or closely followed "remainsan undigested bit of foreign matter." "Over quotation may meanunder thought."

A note system, he told his stu-dents, should permit rearrangement and study of notes in differentrelationships "until the fact itself is brought out against the back-ground in all its important details."

‘What tho’ his head be empty, provided his common-place book be full?’ sneered Jonathan Swift.

For without a clear conceptual plan, an accumulation of excerpts, what Milton called ‘a paroxysm of citations’, can rapidly become a substitute for thought.

I feel sympathy for Robert Southey, whose excerpts from his voracious reading were posthumously published in four volumes as Southey’s Common-Place Book. He confessed in 1822 that,Like those persons who frequent sales, and fill their houses with useless purchases, because they may want them some time or other; so am I for ever making collections, and storing up materials which may not come into use till the Greek Calends. And this I have been doing for five-and-twenty years! It is true that I draw daily upon my hoards, and should be poor without them; but in prudence I ought now to be working up these materials rather than adding to so much dead stock.

In his essay ‘On Intellectual Craftsmanship’, appended to his The Sociological Imagination (1959), C. Wright Mills reassuringly remarks that ‘the way in which these categories change, some being dropped and others being added, is an index of your intellectual progress ... As you rearrange a filing system, you often find that you are, as it were, loosening your imagination.’

As Francis Bacon warned long ago, ‘One man’s notes will little profit another.’

It is possible to take too many notes; the task of sorting, filing and assimilating them can take for ever, so that nothing gets written.

another long forgotten manual for students, History and Historical Research (1928) by C.G. Crump of the Public Record Office: ‘Never make a note for future use in such a form ... that even you yourself will not know what it means, when you come across it some months later.’

In his delightful autobiography, Memories Migrating, the late John Burrow records his perplexities when this injunction was conveyed to him by his graduate supervisor, George Kitson Clark: ‘I brooded on this. What was a fact? And what made it one fact? Surely most facts were compound. How would I know when I had reached bedrock, the ultimate, unsplittable atomic fact?’

As the historian Thomas Fuller remarked, ‘A commonplace book contains many notions in garrison, whence the owner may draw out an army into the field on competent warning.’

According to the Jacobean educational writer John Brinsley, ‘the choycest books of most great learned men, and the notablest students’ were marked through, ‘with little lines under or above’ or ‘by some prickes, or whatsoever letter or mark may best help to call the knowledge of the thing to remembrance’.

“To attain knowledge, add things everyday. To attain wisdom, remove things every day.” ― Lao Tse

The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works.

Congratulations (I guess?) on finding my semi-secret Substack: a place away from my main site to discuss my journey from technologist (a pompous term that really just means I do computers) to writer (a pompous term that really just means I do computers but now it’s art).

You are all computer scientists. You know what FINITE AUTOMATA can do. You know what TURING MACHINES can do. For example, Finite Automata can add but not multiply. Turing Machines can compute any computable function. Turing machines are incredibly more powerful than Finite Automata. Yet the only difference between a FA and a TM is that the TM, unlike the FA, has paper and pencil. Think about it. It tells you something about the power of writing. Without writing, you are reduced to a finite automaton. With writing you have the extraordinary power of a Turing machine.

Anybody who writes knows you don’t simply write what you believe. You write to find out what you believe, or what you can afford to believe. So when I write something and it sounds good, I leave it in, usually, to see what it sounds like to someone else. To somebody else it might sound awful or brash, but I want to be able to have the courage of my brashness. I don’t leave things in that I know to be terrible, or that I don’t, as it were, find interesting—I don’t do that—but if there’s a doubt about it and it sounds interesting, I’ll leave it in. And I want to be free to do that, because that’s why I write. When I write, things occur to me. It’s a way of thinking. But you can perform your thinking instead of just thinking it.

Memorization is not about a language, rather about a feeling you have about information. In other words, how deep it resonates with your life. In this sense, I was also exploring the idea that having an Antinet Zettelkasten is almost like having a "diary", not for your personal feelings or emotions, rather for exploring the way in which your entire mind and heart work together over the years in which we discover the world. For me, exploring subjects and studying is an internal discovery.

if you're thinking without 00:03:26 writing chances are you're fooling yourself we're only

In the words of the cartoonist Dick Guindon:Writing is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is.

For the sole true end of educationis simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whateverinstruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.

We have lostthe tools of learning—the axe and the wedge, the hammer and the saw, thechisel and the plane—that were so adaptable to all tasks. Instead of them, wehave merely a set of complicated jigs, each of which will do but one task andno more, and in using which eye and hand receive no training, so that no manever sees the work as a whole or “looks to the end of the work.”

for as Dialectic will have shown all branches oflearning to be inter-related, so Rhetoric will tend to show that all knowledgeis one.

hildren sit in judgment on their masters;

We dole out lip-service to the importance of education—lip-service and, just occasionally, a little grant of money; we postpone theschool leaving-age, and plan to build bigger and better schools; the teachersslave conscientiously in and out of school-hours, till responsibility becomes aburden and a nightmare; and yet, as I believe, all this devoted effort is largelyfrustrated, because we have lost the tools of learning, and in their absencecan only make a botched and piecemeal job of it.

By teaching them all to read, we have left them atthe mercy of the printed word.

Is it not the great defect of our education to-day (—a defect traceablethrough all the disquieting symptoms of trouble that I have mentioned—)that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils “subjects,” we faillamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think? They learneverything, except the art of learning.

[T.S.] Eliot stood—as he once famously said of himself—for conservatism in politics, classicism in literature, and Catholicism, or rather Anglo-Catholicism, in religion. He looked back into the past, the mediaeval past, as a confirmed laudator temporis acti and in the mediaeval past he looked back not only to John Donne among the metaphysical poets, nor only to William Shakespeare among the Elizabethan dramatists, but before them to the great Dante among Italian poets and behind Dante, though not so obviously, to St. Thomas Aquinas among the scholastic theologians. (From "T.S. Eliot's Metaphysics" by Peter Milward, Culture and Civilization 2009.)

‘Nothing should be taught to theyoung...unless it is not only permitted, but actually demanded by their age andmental strength.’

William Petty, a doctor in Cromwell’s army in 1647, noted that ‘...we seechildren do delight in drums, pipes, fiddles, guns made of elder sticks, andbellowes noses, piped keys, etc., painting flags and ensigns with elder-berriesand corn poppy, making ships with paper, and setting even nut-shells aswimming, handling the tools of workmen as soon as they turn their backs, andtrying to work themselves’ (reported in the Harleian Miscellany, 1810).

Elizabeth I’s tutor, Roger Ascham (1515–68), promotedlearning-by-doing in The Scholemaster: ‘Bring not up your children in learningby compulsion and feare,’ he said, ‘but by playing and pleasure.’

‘Now, all this study of reckoning and geometry...must be presented to them while still young, not inthe form of compulsory instruction.’ ‘Why so?’ ‘Because,’ said I, ‘a free soul ought not to pursueany study slavishly; for while bodily labours performed under constraint do not harm the body,nothing that is learned under compulsion stays with the mind.’ ‘True,’ he said. ‘Do not, then, myfriend, keep children to their studies by compulsion but by play.’The Republic, 536d–e; 537a

Albert Einstein asserted that‘Education is what remains when we have forgotten everything that has beenlearned at school.’

Winston Churchill’s ‘The only time my educationwas interrupted was while I was at school.’

Mark Twain quipped, ‘I have never let my schooling interfere with myeducation.’

"In the event of a fire, the black-bound excerpts are to be saved first," instructed the poet Jean Paul to his wife before setting off on a trip in 1812.

A historical perspective on the sciencesbrings into view controversies, and some beliefs and methodological con-victions that retrospectively turn out to be false—among Blumenberg’scharacteristically colorful picks are Augustine writing that “the stars werecreated for the consolation of people obliged to be active at night,” and“Linnaeus’s opinion that the song of the birds at the first light of morningwas instituted as consolation for the insomnia of the old.”84

Blumenberg quotes GeorgChristoph Lichtenberg’s reaction to William Herschel’s 1781 discovery ofUranus: “Inventing an unfailing means against toothache, curing itinstantly, would be well worth as much and more than discovering anotherplanet.”

Hesaid, “We have to know what we are doing in order to be able to askwhether it is what we should be doing.

Preceding anyspecific historiographical method, the Zettelkasten provides the space inwhich potential constellations between these things can appear concretely,a space to play with connections as they have been formed by historic pre-decessors or might be formed in the present.

Von Bu ̈ low and Krusche analyze this system as a medium of “conversationwith oneself,” where the Zettelkasten stands in for lacking or absent inter-locutors.19

Ulrich von Bu ̈ low and Dorit Krusche have documented Blumenberg’selaborate method of systematically arranging excerpts from the vast varietyof texts he read: “In Blumenberg’s case, nearly all acts of reading, interpre-tation and ordering took material shape within the Zettelkasten.” 17

Francis Bacon once remarked that "some booksare to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to bechewed and digested."

So writing, for me, was this stubborn regaining of the past, and of the ability to engrave time somewhere.

“Attention is the beginning of devotion.”

It was Ranke, too, who set the historian’s task: to find out wie eseigentlich gewesen ist, what really happened, or, literally, how itreally was. His goal is one that will remain forever just beyond ourgrasp for reasons I explained in a “Note on Sources” in The Guns ofAugust (a paragraph that no one ever reads but I think is the bestthing in the book). Summarized, the reasons are that we who writeabout the past were not there. We can never be certain that we haverecaptured it as it really was. But the least we can do is to stay withinthe evidence.

In another fashion, Bush described a ‘memory index’ that would work ‘as wemay think’, by which, cryptically, he meant not artificial intelligence but the capabilityto retrace the paths of the reader’s thought process.

his oft-stated motto ‘de minimis curat historicus’.

Lamenting that ‘I have only two eyes, and, unfortunately cannot use themso as to read two books at the same time’,

Deutsch’s focus on facts was commonplace among professional US historians atthis time, as was his conception of the ‘fact’ as a small item that could fit onto the sizeof an index card (Daston, 2002).

Walter Benjamin termed the book ‘an outdated mediationbetween two filing systems’

Thinking is a simultaneous struggle for conceptualorder and empirical comprehensiveness. You must notclose it up too soon---or you will fail to see all that youshould; you cannot leave it open forever----or you yourselfwill burst. It is this dilemma that makes reflection, onthose rare occasions when it is more or less successful, themost passionate endeavor of which a man is capable

Thinking is a simultaneous struggle for conceptualorder and empirical comprehensiveness.

I do not like to do empirical work if I can possibly avoidit. It m e a n s a great deal of trouble if one has no staff; if onedoes e m p l o y a staff, then the staff is often more troublethan the work itself. Moreover, they leave as soon as theyhave b e e n trained and made useful.

As I thus rearranged the filing system, I found that I wasloosening my imagination.

The reason theytreasure their smallest experiences is because, in thecourse of a lifetime, a modem man has so very littlepersonal experience, and yet experience is so important asa source of good intellectual work.

And yet that is not " r e a l l y " how the project arose.What really happened is that the idea and the plan cameout o f my files; for all projects with me begin and end withthem, and books are simply organized releases from thecontinuous work that goes into them.

Method and theory are like thelanguage of the country you live in: it is nothing to bragabout that you can speak it, but it is a disgrace, as well asan inconvenience, if you cannot.

In this essay I am going to try candidly to report how Ibecame interested in a topic I happen now to be studying,and how I am going about studying it. I know that in doingthis I run the risk of failing in modesty and perhaps even ofclaiming some peculiar virtue for my own personal habits.1 intend no such claims. 1 know also that it may be said:"WelL, that's the way you work; but it's not of much use tom e . " To this the reply seems quite clear; it is: " W o n d e r -ful. Tell me how you w o r k . "

E veryone seriously concerned with teaching complainsthat most students do not know how to do indepen-dent work. They do not know how to read, they do notknow how to take notes, they do not know how to set up aproblem nor how to research it. In short, they do not knowhow to work intellectually.

An example of this comes from President Lyndon Johnson. As he explainedto an aide in 1960, “I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it. If you can convincethe lowest white man that he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t noticeyou picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’llempty his pockets for you.”25

For the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie–deliberate,contrived, and dishonest–but the myth–persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. We subject all facts toa prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinionwithout the discomfort of thought.Former U.S. President John F. Kennedy, Commencement Address at YaleUniversity, June 11, 1962.

After looking at various studies fromthe 1960s until the early 1980s, Barry S. Stein et al. summarises:“The results of several recent studies support the hypothesis that

IntertextsAs Jonathan Culler writes: “Liter-ary works are not to be consideredautonomous entities, ‘organicwholes,’ but as intertextual con-structs: sequences which havemeaning in relation to other textswhich they take up, cite, parody,refute, or generally transform.” ThePursuit of Signs (Ithaca, NY: CornelUniversity Press, 1981), 38.

Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair.

every billionaire is a policy failure

Cf. Mario Bunge (2012), Evaluating Philosophies, Dordrecht: Springer-Verlag, p. 182: The preceding pages suggest an objective yardstick to measure the worth of philosophies: By their fruits ye shalt know them: Tell me what your philosophy is doing for the search for truth or the good, and I will tell me what it is worth.

Such was the opinion of Mark Pattison,who said, History cannot he written from manuscripts,which is as much as to say : " It is impossible fora man to write history from documents which heis obliged to put for himself into a condition inwhich they can be used."

We need not interpret in the Jewish oretymological sense the dictum of Renan : " I do notthink it possible for any one to acquire a clearnotion of history, its limits, and the amount ofconfidence to be placed in the different categoriesof historical investigation, unless he is in the habitof handling original documents." ^

There is only one argumentfor the legitimacy and honourable character ofthe obscure labours of erudition, but it is a de-cisive argument: it rests on their indispensability.No erudition, no history. " Non sunt contemnendaquasi parva" says St. Jerome, ''sine quihus magnaconstare non possunt"

“Substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily use by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them.”Mark Twain

William Inge, and English author: “Originality is undetected plagiarism.”

A clas-sic, Italo Calvino wrote, is a work which relegates the noiseof the present to a background hum—but without renderingthat hum inaudible.

Must You Read Books?

At the time he was selling, Jay-Z was also coming up with rhymes. He normally wrote down his material in a green notebook he carried around with him — but he never took the notebook with him on the streets, he says. "I would run into the corner store, the bodega, and just grab a paper bag or buy juice — anything just to get a paper bag," he says. "And I'd write the words on the paper bag and stuff these ideas in my pocket until I got back. Then I would transfer them into the notebook. As I got further and further away from home and my notebook, I had to memorize these rhymes — longer and longer and longer. ... By the time I got to record my first album, I was 26, I didn't need pen or paper — my memory had been trained just to listen to a song, think of the words, and lay them to tape." Since his first album, he says, he's never written down any of his lyrics. "I've lost plenty of material," he says. "It's not the best way. I wouldn't advise it to anyone. I've lost a couple albums' worth of great material. ... Think about when you can't remember a word and it drives you crazy. So imagine forgetting an entire rhyme. 'What's that? I said I was the greatest something?' "

Each type of index card should have a dif-ferent color, and should include in the top right corner abbre-viations that cross-reference one series of cards to another,and to the general plan. The result is something majestic.

Ballpoint pens are not tools for marking books, and felt-tip highlighters should be prohibited altogether.

The narrator considers this as vandalism and finds it hard to believe how anyone "educated enough to have access to a university library should do this to a book." To him "the treatment of books is a test of civilized behaviour."

Once a pícaro, always a pícaro.

I am sponsored by Big Notecard.

Annotation makes thinking visible.

ryanjamurphy (he/him) — 06/25/2022I think this is the interplay where things get lost. There are very few theorizers, and tonnes of enactors. And everyone ends up thinking the enactors are theorizers, but they're not. They're developing specific methods without building up — and especially without critiquing — the underlying theory.

slono — 06/25/2022PKM -> prescriptive knowledge management

Wittgenstein makes a similar observation, pointing out that “the aspects ofthings that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity andfamiliarity (one is unable to notice something – because it is always beforeone’s eyes).” 3

Whitehead once described the mentality of modern science as having beenforged through “the union of passionate interest in the detailed facts with equaldevotion to abstract generalization.”

The moral is not to abandon useful tools; rather, it is, first, that one shouldmaintain enough perspective to be able to detect the arrival of that inevitable daywhen the research that can be conducted with these tools is no longer important;

The experts have the responsibility of making clear the actuallimits of their understanding and of the results they have so far achieved,

"it's not the amount of speakers that will save us"

In getting my books, I have been always solicitous of an ample margin; this not so much through any love of the thing in itself, however agreeable, as for the facility it affords me of penciling suggested thoughts, agreements and differences of opinion, or brief critical comments in general. Where what I have to note is too much to be included within the narrow limits of a margin, I commit it to a slip of paper, and deposit it between the leaves; taking care to secure it by an imperceptible portion of gum tragacanth paste. — Edgar Allen Poe on marginalia

The better students tend to exceed the indicated maximums.

Mr. York Powell, lateregius professor of modern histor a t Oxford, said: “Theformation and expression of ethicarjudgments . . . is nota thing within the historian’s province.”

“Anticipatory plagiarism occurs when someone steals your original idea and publishes it a hundred years before you were born.” - Robert K. Merton

"PDF is where documents go to die. Once something is in PDF, it's like a roach motel for data."

you will never be ridiculous inhelping others— nobody will laugh at you

Mortimer Adler (another independent scholar). “My train of thought greiout of my life just the way a leaf or a branch grows our of a tree.” His thinking and writing occurred as a regular part of his life. In one of his book;Thinking and Working on the Waterfront, he wrote:My writing is'done in railroad yards while waiting for a freight, in the fieldswhile waiting for a truck, and at noon after lunch. Now and then I take aday off to “put myself in order." I go through the notes, pick and discard.The residue is usually a few paragraphs. My mind must always have somethingto chew on. I think on man, America, and the world. It is not as pretentiousas it sounds.

I like @prometheanhindsight’s explanation “Permanent,” just meaning “permanently useful.” Not “unchanging/fully formed.”

"My grandfather used to always say when we got to customs we only had hard work, tiredness and dust to declare."

“Bedrooms were the first MySpace. You came over to someone’s room, and it was all their music tastes and pictures of their friends.

Quine's book Word and Object (p. 3f) made famous Neurath's analogy which compares the holistic nature of language and consequently scientific verification with the construction of a boat which is already at sea (cf. Ship of Theseus): .mw-parser-output .templatequote{overflow:hidden;margin:1em 0;padding:0 40px}.mw-parser-output .templatequote .templatequotecite{line-height:1.5em;text-align:left;padding-left:1.6em;margin-top:0}We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction.

As Raymond Chandler put it, “when you have to use your energy to put those words down, you are more apt to make them count.”

Montaigne once teased the writer Erasmus, who was known for his dedication to reading scholarly works, by asking with heavy sarcasm “Do you think he is searching in his books for a way to become better, happier, or wiser?” In Montaigne’s mind, if he wasn’t, it was all a waste.

And if you still need a why–I’ll let this quote from Seneca answer it (which I got from my own reading and notes): “We should hunt out the helpful pieces of teaching and the spirited and noble-minded sayings which are capable of immediate practical application–not far far-fetched or archaic expressions or extravagant metaphors and figures of speech–and learn them so well that words become works.”

You own your success.

Don't shit where you need to critically think, as the old saying goes.

ErnestHemingway once said that good prose is architecture,not interior decorating.

Class discussion reflected onthe emphasis on “family values” in recent news coverageof politicians looking for issues near election time.Perhaps you were stimulated by what the pundits had tosay. Or maybe you were offended by the superficiality ofthe “soundbites” – after all, you had just read Odysseustelling Agamemnon in Book Eleven that “empty wordsare evil.”

My task...is, by the power of the written word, to makeyou hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to makeyou see. Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)

One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and flexibility with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected from storage.

It’s so much easier to see what worked than to predictwhat might work. Sönke Ahrens

Thewhole point of this note-making process is not only toprovide ourselves with ideas we want to pursue, but toactually show us which ideas we are most interested in.

the better we can become at collecting,understanding, and remembering information, the morelikely we are to solve hard problems.

ven if that reader is just future-you –and this is one of the benefits of making notes your futureself can read!

AuthorW.H. Auden demystified both literature and criticismwhen he said, “Here is a verbal contraption. How doesit work?”

Far more important than what these notes are calledis what they do in helping you make the transition fromacquiring information from others to making it yourown.

you can't do a proj-ect, you can only do the action steps it requires.

Citing Pliny’s “no book so bad,” Gesner made a point of accumulating information about all the texts he could learn about, barbarian and Christian, in manuscript and in print, extant and not, without separating the good from the bad: “We only wanted to list them, and we have left to others free selection and judgment.”202

“Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.” ― Robert Collier

The industrious apprentice will find in the Appendix (C) a short memorandumon the method of analytic note-taking, which we have found most convenient inthe use of documents and contemporaneous literature, as well as in the recording ofinterviews and personal observations.

And whilst I could plan out an admirable system ofnote-taking, the actual execution of the plan was, owing toan inveterate tendency to paraphrase extracts which I in¬tended to copy, not to mention an irredeemably illegible hand¬writing, a wearisome irritation to me.

CHAPTER ICHARACTER AND CIRCUMSTANCEIn the following pages I describe the craft of a social in¬vestigator as I have practised it. I give some account of myearly and crude observation and clumsy attempts at reason¬ing, and then of the more elaborated technique of note¬taking, of listening to and recording the spoken word and ofobserving and even experimenting in the life of existinginstitutions.

If what is in question ”, states the most learned German methodologist, “ isa many-sided subject, such as a history of a people or a great organisation, theseveral sheets of notes must be so arranged that for each aspect of the subject thematerial can be surveyed as a whole. With any considerable work the notes mustbe taken upon separate loose sheets, which can easily be arranged in different orders,and among which sheets with new dates can be interpolated without difficulty ”(Lehrbuch der historischen Metkode, by Bernheim, 1908, p. 555).

He explains the purpose of his "waste book" in his notebook E: Die Kaufleute haben ihr Waste book (Sudelbuch, Klitterbuch glaube ich im deutschen), darin tragen sie von Tag zu Tag alles ein was sie verkaufen und kaufen, alles durch einander ohne Ordnung, aus diesem wird es in das Journal getragen, wo alles mehr systematisch steht ... Dieses verdient von den Gelehrten nachgeahmt zu werden. Erst ein Buch worin ich alles einschreibe, so wie ich es sehe oder wie es mir meine Gedancken eingeben, alsdann kann dieses wieder in ein anderes getragen werden, wo die Materien mehr abgesondert und geordnet sind.[2] "Tradesmen have their 'waste book' (scrawl-book, composition book I think in German), in which they enter from day to day everything they buy and sell, everything all mixed up without any order to it, from there it is transferred to the day-book, where everything appears in more systematic fashion ... This deserves to be imitated by scholars. First a book where I write down everything as I see it or as my thoughts put it before me, later this can be transcribed into another, where the materials are more distinguished and ordered."

The Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi kept a notebook, called Zibaldone, from 1817 to 1832. The idea of keeping that, which contains no fewer than 4,526 pages, was possibly suggested by a priest who fled from the French Revolution and came to live in the poet's hometown. The priest suggested that "every literary man should have a written chaos such as this: notebook containing sottiseries, adrersa, excerpta, pugillares, commentaria... the store-house out of which fine literature of every kind may come, as the sun, moon, and stars issued out of chaos."[1]