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Since reading How to Take Smart Notes earlier this year, I’ve thought more about (1) how I read books and (2) what it even means to read a book.

Here are some questions to show what I have in mind:

Let’s say you read a book from beginning to end, and you take no notes. Instead, you simply enjoy the narrative or the argument.

• Is that a “pure” form of reading? “Pure” compared to reading more analytically, with a pencil in hand, so that you can underline words in the paragraphs or make marks in the margin to highlight key points in the argument?

• Is that more-analytical form of reading somehow fundamentally different from the more easy-going form of reading?

• And what about going back later and reviewing the notations and marks you made in the book: is that really “reading”? Or is that “reviewing”, i.e., some totally separate act?

Here are two notes I wrote in September 2020 that constitute the beginning of an answer to my own questions:

Reading and time with a book: Reviewing a book and the notes that I’ve taken in it isn’t time spent “after” or “outside” reading. That’s part of the reading process that I’ve developed and that I choose to engage in.

That first initial reading of a pristine text is not “more” genuinely reading – the “real” form of reading – than reading again to see what I noted and doing something with those notes that I made in the text.

“Each truth, whoever may say it, is from the Holy Spirit.”

That line translates this Latin sentence from Thomas Aquinas:

Omne verum, a quocumque dicatur, a spiritu sancto est.

The line occurs in Aquinas’s treatise about truth and “trueness”: De Veritate. He borrows the line from Ambrose, who wrote 800 years before Aquinas (who wrote it 800 years before I copied and pasted it into this blog post).

It’s a proposition that remains true today. It’s also a proposition that more Catholics should reflect on. Because it’s a proposition that opens up the possibility of insights in corners that might otherwise remain unexplored.

Aquinas drew on Ambrose when addressing the question “whether every other truth is from the ultimate truth” (utrum omnis veritas alia sit a veritate prima). This “ultimate,” “first,” or “foundational” truth is God.

So is every truth, no matter what it is or whoever says it, from God?

Some were arguing: No, there are truths or realities that cannot be from God. The real wrongs and truly ugly things within the world cannot be from God.

Aquinas’s full response is nuanced, but the basic response is the simple and bold reminder that anything that truly is, is truly from God. Reality is reality, no matter what kind of reality it is, and all reality is held in existence by God.

A variation on that theme is the line quoted above: anything that is true, regardless of the immediate source (this or that human being), is from the Holy Spirit (God) as the ultimate source.

This is encouraging. Truth is not limited. No one has a monopoly on it. It can pop up anywhere. And when you come across the truth, no matter how humble it may be or weird it may seem, it will be something worth attending to: a spiritu sancto est.

On Episode 31 of the Deep Questions podcast, Cal Newport spoke with Ryan Holiday.

They discussed the process of writing non-fiction. I was interested by Newport’s description, because it sounds so natural.

Here’s what I mean:

Newport likes interesting ideas. He’s a thinker. He’s naturally engaging in the material that a non-fiction writer engages in. It’s just what he does. He described this as a lifestyle of engaging with interesting ideas.

But how does that intellectually-engaged lifestyle turn into words published on a screen or a page?

There needs to be a practice, something you actually do.

And so Newport and Holiday discussed the importance of collecting. They both collect interesting material: ideas and quotes and stories and observations. They collect those, even if they have no immediate use for them. They collect that material just because they find it interesting.

So if you’re naturally interested in ideas or curious about things, and you want to be a writer, then start collecting what catches your attention, even if you don’t know whether you’ll do something with it.

If it works for Newport and Holiday, there’s something to it.

I read an article on the Zettelkasten and antifragility.

I clipped this quotation from the article:

Tinker a lot. Write lots of Zettels and apply the outline method in abundance. The more Zettel you write the faster you erase the downsides of investing time in writing a Zettel. It seems that you’d produce more waste but the more you write the less wasteful the waste becomes.

Inspired by that idea — adding more notes so that “waste” becomes “abundance” — I wrote this:

You need a certain degree of profligacy to be an artist: a willingness to throw it all away, or at least to “waste” time in pursuit of what you love or what holds your interest.

This mention of “waste” in connection with creative pursuits reminds me of a passage in Lewis Hyde’s The Gift:

The fruit of the creative spirit is the work of art itself, and if there is a first-fruits ritual for artists, it must either be the willing “waste” of art (in which one is happy to labor all day with no hope of production, nothing to sell, nothing to show off, just fish thrown back into the sea as soon as they are caught) or else, when there is a product, it must be this thing we have already seen, the dedication of the work back toward its origins.

Creative work of any kind requires offering something, perhaps only time and effort. It may feel wasteful, but it’s a waste that fosters fertility.

There’s a show on Amazon Prime called The Goes Wrong Show. The premise: a small troupe of actors struggle through a stage production in which everything that can go wrong does go wrong. Part of the comedy is that the backstage becomes a visible part of the show, and the mistakes in the performance become part of the performance itself.

I thought about this when I read this article about the Zettelkasten of Niklas Luhmann, when the author describes the Zettelkasten as the “backstage” of Luhmann’s final theory:

It contains not only validated knowledge but also reflects the thought process, including potential mistakes and blind alleys that were later revised but not (!) removed from the file as the original cards always remained in the file and perhaps a new card with revisions was added if needed. In this sense, the file is more than just an analog database of Luhmann’s theory: it can be seen as — drawing on the words of Erving Goffman — the backstage of his theory and therefore as Niklas Luhmann’s intellectual autobiography.

Niklas Luhmann’s Card Index: The Fabrication of Serendipity
Johannes F.K. Schmidt

It is easy to look at a theory or an argument, expressed in the final form of a published book or an article, as a flawless performance, predestined to turn out in just that precise way.

But if you look at the author’s notes (especially very thorough notes, such as Luhmann’s Zettelkasten), you would see the backstage scramble and the improvisation of discovery that make the final presentation of the theory or argument possible.

Together, this excerpt about the “backstage” of Luhmann’s thinking and the The Goes Wrong Show remind me that a succesful performance presupposes necessary work that is not supposed to emerge in the performance itself.