Notes, essays, and the inevitability of loss, forgetting and fading identity

Some ideas that are percolating right now:

CGP Grey and Myke talk about notes.  In the midst of this discussion they get talking about what constitutes a note, and use the term "atomic notes."

"If you're writing a note, shouldn't that note be in the project you are working on?"

"The Zettel-zealots" 

"I am here as just like a value vampire, to extract whatever value I can"

I take a lot of notes for classes I teach using Goodnotes on the Ipad, but due to limitations of the interface and my laziness, I tend to not do much more than highlight key passages and then never get around to jotting down notes.  However, reading chapters in Apple Books allows me to highlight passages and put them in the Notes app, where I can then make slides.  These slides, in turn, make me look organized and reduce the anxiety associated with teaching.

Zettelkasten:  the promise of creating a place for all of your notes that will, at some point, almost automagically generate essays.

But why do I want to write essays?  

• Someone out there cares about the same things I do.  I want to find them.
• I'm going to die.  I want to leave something behind, even if it only is seen by twelve people.  Over on Metafilter there was a discussion of parents who had left behind a book that still cropped up from time to time.  I'd like to create a reverse time capsule.
• I'll learn more if I write more
• I'll become a better writer
• I hope to write a sentence that doesn't begin with "I"
  

Judith Vorst wrote a book called "Necessary Losses" that I haven't read, but I've been thinking about  unavoidable losses, the inevitability of loss (my mother is ill) and all the writing and note taking I do that just kind of disappears.

This comment over on Metafilter:

forgetfulness is a gift. I've been at this nonsense for over 10 years now. I still have scraps of old ideas I filed away in Evernote, in OneNote, in Workflowy, in todo.txt... And you know what? It would have been fine to lose them. Most of my thoughts are stupid. One consequence of GTD-style "universal capture" is that it flattens all thoughts to the same level of atomicity, which they don't deserve. That's part of the simple elegance of its promise, but again, it just doesn't align with reality in my experience. There are the urgent things, like taking the laundry out of the dryer, that I want to remember for the very short term. Then there are the "someday/maybe" things, stubs of ideas, dreams, plans, whatever -- I've come to the personal conclusion that most of those things should be permitted to pass through and be forgotten, not filed for fear of losing them. If I think of a thought 5 or 10 times, then I might turn it into a project. But the discretion, the soft-editorial power of forgetting, is way more valuable to me nowadays.

The promise of Zettelkasten also reminds me of the promises of spaced repetition:

Surrender to this Algorithm

So I guess where I'm headed is I want to take notes about what I'm learning, turn those notes into short essays that will end up here, and maybe turn those essays into a book, that will sell 1,000 copies.  Then, 20 years from now when I am moldering in the ground, someone will find a copy, enjoy reading it, and contact one of my surviving children and say, "Hey, I just read your dad's book"  

The Reverse Time Capsule

I'm not sure why I'm putting my rough notes in this blog, when they should go into Obsidian.