Atomic Notes
- Improve your notes and your life with two-word phrases.
- Does the Zettelkasten have a top and a bottom?
- Even the index is just another note.
- Top level categories in my notes.
- When it comes to writing notes, how much mess is just enough?
- Beckett, Chris. Dark Eden. Corvus, 2012.
- Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. Translated by William Weaver, Harvest Book / Harcourt Brace & Company, 1974.
- Chiang, Ted. “Story of Your Life.” Stories of Your Life and Others, Small Beer Press, 2002, pp. 91-140.
- Hachemi, Munir. Living Things. Translated by Julai Sanches. Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2024.
- Hachemi, Munir. The Mulai. Translated by Julia Sanches, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2026.
- Le Guin, Ursula K. The Dispossessed. Harper Voyager, 2014.
- Libertella, Héctor. El árbol de Saussure: Una utopía. Adriana Hidalgo Editora, 2000.
- Miéville, China. Embassytown. Del Rey, 2012.
- Morrissey, John. Bird Deity. Text Publishing, 2026.
- Piercy, Marge. Woman on the Edge of Time. Fawcett Crest, 1985.
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A search for meaning in the palace of lost memories: Thoughts on Piranesi, a novel by Susanna Clarke
In this article I examine two opposing worldviews when it comes to collections and the environment: viewing the world as something to exploit instrumentally, versus recognising its intrinsic value. I guess I’m interested in whether our systems of gathering and keeping serve to honour the world or merely extract value from it.
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How to decide what to include in your notes
This article explores commonplace books, personal collections of information, and the deliberate choices behind what we collect (and what we discard).
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How to start a Zettelkasten from your existing deep experience
Here I warn against building a “magnificent but useless encyclopaedia” and I champion active, meaningful engagement over passive hoarding. Easier said than done, but I’m trying.
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This is where I reflect on how personal notes construct a library of interpretations, and I ask how we decide what’s worth preserving.
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The Toe of the Year and the Curious Case of John Donne’s Missing Commonplace Book
This article looks at the mechanics of commonplace collecting and reflects on the risk of collecting quotes without genuinely digesting them. And yes, there’s a poem about the toe of the year.
Faint praise for categories
Author and activist Rebecca Solnit isn’t too keen on the apparent eagerness to categorise.
“Categories too often become where thought goes to die. That is, there’s a widespread tendency to act as if once something has been categorized, no further consideration is required.” — A is for Airtight Categories
I’m not all that keen on the established categories myself. Not in my notes, anyway, and often not in my life. I’m not looking for categories. Instead, I’m usually looking for patterns.
I feel that placing an idea or concept in a category tends to close down further thought, like closing the lid on a box. In contrast, discovering a pattern tends to be just the start of consideration, of enquiry, of conversation, not the end of it.
Patterns invite a sense of wonder; categories tend to deny it. As Solnit said I her book Hope in the Dark, “the Moon is profound except when we land on it”.
Being quick to categorise can look like a neat short-cut to understanding, but it often doesn’t work out that way. Established categories can hide more than they reveal. Relying on them can be a way of fooling yourself into believing you know more than you do. One of the reasons I write slowly is to allow myself space and time to think through my ignorance — and to think things through by writing them down. Solnit says:
“We live in a time where people are more isolated then ever from the kind of private, personal engagement where you can wonder, doubt, improvise, or just admit you don’t know, and where many of us are instead more than ever in the para-public sphere of social media where you perform for an audience of casual acquaintances and strangers who may savage you if you get anything wrong or even seem weak or uncertain or uncommitted.”
Well, I feel being uncertain or uncommitted isn’t necessarily a sign of weakness, and writing slowly isn’t necessarily a sign of laziness. Look where certain, committed and fast has got us in recent times.
And admitting that you don’t know, far from being a sign of ignorance, is often a hallmark of expertise. That’s the paradox of mastery. It’s why the expert must remain a beginner.
One kind of category I do have time for is the category that no one has thought of yet. Creating new categories of thought is how the world is re-made. It’s curious that those who are the keenest on categories tend to be the least receptive to the idea that we just made them up.
“The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell.” ― Rebecca Solnit, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics.
Further reading:
There is something you find interesting
💬 “Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.” – Annie Dillard, ‘Write Till You Drop’. New York Times, 28 May, 1989.
I’ve mentioned Annie Dillard previously, and in fact have quoted another section from this very article.
Anyway, Dillard put her finger on the reason I wrote my little book, Shu Ha Ri, the Japanese Way of Learning. Not that no one else understood the concept (I mean, almost everyone in Japan probably understands it better than me), but that I’d never seen a satisfying book-length treatment. So that’s where I began, by expressing my own fascination.
Between the lines by Rachel Dioso-Villa
I like how Australia puts an emphasis on portraiture as a culturally significant art form — a greater emphasis, certainly than it receives in the UK, where I grew up.
The 2026 Brisbane Portrait Prize has a selection of interestingly diverse entries, showing what’s possible with this form.
An entry that caught my eye was that of criminologist Rachel Dioso-Villa, titled ‘Between the Lines’. It’s a large series of hand-painted notes and images on rice paper. For me this demonstrates how the making of notes can be an art in itself, and how from this repeated practice larger themes gradually arise — in this case, a self portrait.
Here’s the write-up:
💬 “Between the Lines is not a conventional self-portrait. Across more than 150 suspended sheets of rice paper, Rachel Dioso-Villa has built an image of herself through accumulated illustrations. Each page was made over twelve months, accompanying her through conferences, meetings, travel, her office, studio and home. Handled, written on, painted and reworked over time, every sheet holds traces of her life.
The fragments of text and image that move across the surface were formed while reading case materials and listening to the stories of people wrongfully convicted. This is work Dioso-Villa has been doing for over fifteen years as an Associate Professor of Criminology. Writing appears and disappears, some passages remain; others are buried beneath layers of mark and memory. “The work did not begin as a self-portrait,” she reflects. “It became one.””
You can view the artwork at the artist’s Brisbane Portrait Prize site.
The idea of note-making as art has arisen in several different places, including in the work of Georges Didi-Hubermann, and Daniel Wisser.
💬 “Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View
While reading, I’m acutely aware of certain phrases and sentences that seem particularly significant. Struggling to articulate this significance is the development of taste.
When I read something and think “that’s interesting”, I make a note to record why I find it interesting. This is the way I expose shadowy intuition to the sun.
Thoughts on The Mulai, a novel by Munir Hachemi
The Mulai, Munir Hachemi, tr. Julia Sanches (Fitzcarraldo Editions 978-1804272732, June 2026; Coach House Books 978-1-55245-519-7, July 2026).
I came across The Mulai by Spanish author Munir Hachemi because it was the pick for August’s Indieweb Book Club, and I’m happy I did.
This is the kind of intellectual science fiction that intrigues me: lost or unknown ‘alien’ civilisations, or the remnants of failed attempts at planetary colonisation, clinging on to what they remember of ‘civilisation’, or perhaps abandoning it for something stranger and more adaptive.
Familiar tropes are hard at work here. The mysterious nearly-human culture with its almost-but-not-quite-indecipherable language. The unreliable anthropologist, who reports on their observations and is both repelled and strangely attracted to what they encounter. The sudden reversals of expectation and the uncomfortable presentiment of doom.
I’ve enjoyed several books that work with and extend these ideas. Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time asks whether it’s possible to work for a better future without succumbing to Utopian fantasies. China Miéville’s Embassytown addresses the near impossibilities of translation across incommensurable cultures and physiologies, as does Ted Chiang’s novella, “Story of Your Life”. Chris Beckett’s Dark Eden explores the travails of the descendants of human colonists, abandoned on an inhospitable planet. Bird Deity by John Morrissey depicts the stark brutality of planetary colonisation that exploits everything it touches while understanding almost nothing of the indigenous inhabitants it depends on (Here’s a review). And hovering behind all these works is Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, that “ambiguous utopia.”
I make this litany to mark out the familiar territory, but as Chris Beckett said of his novel, “it’s what you do with these themes that’s important, not whether they’re new or not.”
And indeed these recurring themes remain vital. How are we to encounter the strange, the radically different, the inexplicably other? It’s something people seem to be terrible at. In her review of Embassytown for The Guardian, Ursula K. Le Guin observed:
“There are men right now who have never learned how to talk to women. How will we talk to somebody really different – aliens?”
The eponymous Mulai of Hachemi’s novel are definitely not familiar. They aren’t aliens, but for Dr. Nahum Cordovero, the “archaeologist” who comes to study them in their 159th year of isolation, they might as well be. They are the survivors of a failed attempt at planetary colonisation, terraforming pioneers, abandoned when their distant sponsors became preoccupied with a war.
After generations of abandonment the Mulai have forgotten almost everything about the advanced technology that still keeps them alive. They have long sublimated their hope of rescue into a more abstract eschatology: “The tree comes.” This mantra comforts them, perhaps especially due to its lack of any connection to reality.
Since arriving on this barely inhabitable planet they have rapidly and comprehensively transformed almost every aspect of their previous way of life. To Dr. Cordovero, everything about them is tantalisingly hard to understand.
As he comes to terms with the language of the Mulai, it both clarifies the culture and renders it harder to interpret. His status as an outsider is tested to breaking point. By learning the language, the culture it represents begins to interpret him.
Meanwhile, Faida, one of the Mulai, is also finding it hard to understand life. Having embarked on a quite different quest, she has encountered a book hidden by one of the original colonists. The reader may recognise it almost at once as Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, but to Faida it’s a deep enigma. She resolves to attempt the impossible: to break with taboos in order to translate this strange artifact into the Mulai language.
From these different angles, then, questions of language, culture, and interpretation are problematised rather than reaching a clear resolution.
Hachemi’s previous novel, Living Things, observed that nuances and misunderstandings “are not the collateral damage of language but the conditions of its existence”.
The reader is deeply implicated in this process. How to make sense of this fragmented narrative? What do these strange words mean? What is the actual purpose of Cordovero’s mission and what are the implications of his heavily censored conclusions (censorship presumably being a condition of their existence)?
“El árbol viene” — “The Tree Comes” — is the original Spanish title of the novel. This is the meaning of mu lai, 木来 in Chinese. It’s part of a sign at the entrance to the dome under which the Mulai live, which, if it wasn’t for the weathering of the planet’s fierce seasons, would still read 未来, wei lai. The now missing extra stroke would signify, “Future”, the official, long-forgotten name of the original mission.
This is a sign that we’re firmly in the territory of metafiction. It is also a reference to one of the works quoted in the epigraph to the novel, Argentinian author Héctor Libertella’s El árbol de Saussure: Una utopía. This work declares “the future is over” at the same time as it pulls apart the famous claims of the Swiss linguist of the tenuous relationship between the word “tree” and the living tree it signifies.
The metafiction deepens as the reader is led to wonder about the importance of de Saussure’s linguistic theories and their appropriation by Jacques Lacan via Libertella’s satire. The same applies to Calvino’s Invisible Cities, along with two fictional works repeatedly alluded to as the narrative progresses: the Libertarian Codex, and its “first amendment”, the Teachings of Flukeh.
All is puzzling fragments in this tale told through a multi-authored collection of papers, disjointed in time and of often dubious perspective. This sense of spatial, cultural and literary estrangement is surely appropriate for a novel fundamentally about estrangement. I found it deeply compelling and finished the book in two intense sittings. No sooner had I read the last page than I found myself turning straight back to the first page to re-read with a new, if still very incomplete understanding. “The future is over,” begins Dr. Cordovero. But that’s just the start.
There’s a great review of The Mulai by Xiao Yue Shan in Asymptote Journal. It’s worth reading even if you don’t read the novel.
And from an interview with the author (in Spanish) I discovered he seems to have a Mulai glyph tattooed on his forearm. Now that’s commitment to your art.
See more on the IndieWeb Book Club
Now read:
César Aira on the constant flight forward
Thoughts on Piranesi, a novel by Susanna Clarke
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, available now.
References
Is your note collection making or unmaking the world? A reflection on institutional collecting, personal note archives, and why output matters more than input.
#Zettelkasten #Writing #NoteTaking #PKM #Blogging
Collecting notes is just the start
“The British Museum is not a good thing in and of itself. It is good only to the extent that its influence in the world is for the good. The collection is a starting point, an opportunity, an instrument. Will the museum use it to influence the future of the planet and its peoples? Or will it continue to project the power of colonial gain and corporate indemnity?” — Ahdaf Soueif, On Resigning from the British Museum’s Board of Trustees Soueif2019resigning
As a resigning member of the board of trustees of the British Museum, novelist Ahdaf Soueif was in a strong position to understand the point of collecting. His words, written in 2019, stand for any form of collecting, from world-leading to extremely modest.
Soueif reminds us that any collection is only “a starting point, an opportunity, an instrument”.
His resignation follows what I take to be an increasing realisation that in spite of the PR, through its collection and curation the British Museum really does perpetuate a colonial worldview, and is an instrument of destructive power. In particular he calls out the Museum’s continued sponsorship by oil multinational BP, its lack of leadership on the issue of the repatriation of looted artefacts, and its reluctance to support fair work conditions for ancillary staff in the wake of the collapse of service provider Carillion.
He asked of the Museum, not entirely rhetorically, it is to be hoped,
“will it be involved in making a world that is habitable, just, interconnected and open for the next generation; or will it continue to collaborate with those who are unmaking the world before our eyes?”
I think that this might apply as a test of any collection, at least in the following sense: Is the act of collecting making or unmaking the world?
In some very small way, even my collection of notes must play its part. Is my act of collecting making or unmaking the world?
Hence: publishing is important. It’s not enough to keep collecting. The aim is to make something and to share it with others.
Further Reading
I wrote a book, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning. It’s available now.
Dave Winer has said WordPress really needs a simple, normal writing interface and I couldn’t agree more. We’re hardly alone and it turns out they’ve been listening.
Do you ever feel there’s too many ready-made answers that don’t fit your needs? Me too. That’s why I’m exploring an alternative: ’living questions’. Not quite Rilke, but also not not Rilke. writingslowly.com
#NoteTaking #LifelongLearning #Zettelkasten
Living questions
Living questions
Instead of chasing after easy answers, the poet Rilke urged a young artist to “live the questions”. Sound advice maybe, but which questions really matter, and how can we go about living them?
“I beg you … to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not know how to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now, perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer …” – Rainer Maria Rilke
Yes, it’s all very well ‘living the questions’ but which questions are we talking about here? All of them? Some of them? Which ones?