An online commonplace book
The patron saint of overworked teachers, Alice Kober, taught five classes at a time at Brooklyn College in the 1940s. At any rate, she taught during the day. At night, she set about deciphering an ancient language, Linear B, that had been uncovered on clay tablets at the turn of the century and that stood as a Mount Everest for linguists, a seemingly impossible puzzle. A middle aged spinster, the daughter of working class immigrants, she collected the statistics for each sign of the dead language onto two hundred thousand paper slips. Because of paper shortages during and after the war these slips had to be repurposed from any spare paper she could find. The slips in turn were collected into old cigarette cartons. Her work was cut off by an untimely illness, but she laid the foundation for the dramatic decipherement that took place only a few years after her death.
One never knows when their work will bear fruit. Keep going.
Hitz, Zena. Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life. United States, Princeton University Press, 2021. (pp 41)
We promise “till death do us part” when our love is young and good-looking and when life is full of promise, but it is in failure or decrepitude or at the hospital bed that we learn what we meant and why.
Zena Hitz
Zena dropping truth right from the introduction.
Hitz, Zena. Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life. United States, Princeton University Press, 2021.
You Only Know What You Make.
Giambattista Vico – (verum ipsum factum)
This from Tiago Forte’s Forte Labs Newsletter. Tiago goes on to add:
It’s my reminder to you to not just passively consume more information that soon will be forgotten. Instead, use what you’re learning to make new things.
When she sat still, her swirling thoughts settled like tea leaves at the bottom of a cup. Then she could see clearly. She knew herself. She was a dreamer. A wonderer. A collector. She had to keep looking.
But she also had to earn a living.
– Laura Alary
Maria Mitchell was an astronomer, teacher, librarian, and entrepreneur (she started her own school. I’d consider that being an entrepreneur.)
She discovered the comet C/1847 T1. This was a response to the challenge put forth from King Frederick VI of Denmark offering a gold medal to the first person to discover a new comet.
Once again, picture books, children’s books, are underrated.
Alary, Laura. The Astronomer Who Questioned Everything: The Story of Maria Mitchell. Canada, Kids Can Press Ltd, 2022.
People called it a thinking machine, but Ada knew better. The intelligence was not in the machine itself, but in the genius of its designer.
– Diane Stanley
Ada Lovelace understood where the genius of the Difference Engine came from – Charles Babbage.
Does this quote still apply today? Is the genius now in the machine?
Again, picture books, children’s books, are underrated.
Stanley, Diane. Ada Lovelace, Poet of Science: The First Computer Programmer. United States, Simon & Schuster/Paula Wiseman Books, 2016.
“Whatever you come across…you will be able to note down immediately… be it an anecdote or a fable or an illustrative example or a strange incident or a maxim or a witty remark or a remark notable for some other quality or a proverb or a metaphor or a simile.”
Erasmus of Rotterdam
From the commonplacing tradition comes Zibaldones.
Zibaldones are similar to commonplace books, but they incorporate pictures, physical memories. Ancient scrapbooks if you will, but with an educational and cataloguing bent.
The Atlas Obscura article: How to Keep a Zibaldone, the 14th Century’s Answer to Tumblr is a terrific primer.
The trunk of an elephant might feel cool to the touch. Not what one expects, perhaps, from 200 pounds of writhing muscle, strong enough to uproot a tree, which tapers down to two “fingers,” giving it enough delicacy to detect the ripest berry on a shrub, and pluck it. Feeling an elephant’s trunk draws you to her other great feature: melancholic eyes that are veiled by long and dusty lashes. This combination of might with the suggestion of serene contemplation is surely the reason that elephants seem to embody a special state of grace.
I appreciate this description of an elephant’s trunk. It’s a surprising, captivating way to open a letter. Note the focus, the detail. Wang could have described the entire elephant, but instead he honed in on one appendage.
Good writing is specific.
Also, he recounts this admonition about learning he wrote in his 2017 letter.
“Knowledge can compound. I’d like for us to think more about how to accelerate the growth of learning. The traditional method of reading more books and trying to improve professionally are good starts, but it’s not enough to stop there. One can learn more by traveling to new places, being social in different ways, reading new types of books, changing jobs or professions, moving to a new place, by doing better and by doing more.”
– Dan Wang
Learning can compound.
Dan’s letters are beyond bookmarking. They are worth printing out and reading in hand.
Skip to the full 2023 letter below:
Fate guides the willing; it drags the unwilling behind it.
Ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt. (letters, CVII)
– Seneca
If reading Meditations seems like a slog, maybe Sentences from Seneca would be more accessible.
It’s pamphlet sized, with some of Seneca’s most revered tweets, sentences.
A good entry point if you’re stoic shy.
Floodlights and Goalposts 