I
Reading
In Praise of Shadows
Jun'ichirō Tanizaki
On the beauty of dimness — and why light is not always enlightenment.
The shelves
Library
Books, notes and quotes — a small reading life kept in the open. The shelves are honest about what is finished and what is only started.
Books
6 on the shelf
T
Reading
The Glass Bead Game
Hermann Hesse
Castalia is the original digital garden — an order of scholars devoted to the play of connections between every field of knowledge.
G
Queued
Gödel, Escher, Bach
Douglas Hofstadter
Strange loops, self-reference, and why meaning escapes the machine — the book that made me want to build minds.
T
Queued
The Art of Memory
Frances A. Yates
Memory palaces, the classical mnemonic tradition — an architecture of mind built two thousand years before computers.
A
Read
A Pattern Language
Christopher Alexander
Architecture's grammar of human feeling — reread yearly as a software designer.
T
Read
The Order of Time
Carlo Rovelli
Time is not what it seems — and memory is what makes it real for us.
Notes
On repetition as cultivation
Spaced repetition is usually sold as efficiency — more retention per minute. But the better frame is horticultural. Review is watering. Each return to a card strengthens the root, and the schedule is simply the rain cycle. The goal is not to remember everything. It is to let the important things take root deeply enough to survive the droughts of neglect.
Zettelkasten in the age of language models
The zettelkasten was a technology for externalizing thought: capture a note, link it, let the network surprise you. Language models do not replace this practice; they change its economics. Retrieval becomes trivial, so the scarce resource is no longer *finding* an old idea but *deciding* which ideas deserve to be linked at all. The slip box survives because the bottleneck was never search. It was judgment.
Kept quotes
“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
“The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp.”