Literature and permanent notes
🧩EXPLANATION
Taught versus concluded. This is the distinction the vault runs on, and it is Sönke Ahrens's, from 📕 How to Take Smart Notes, describing how the sociologist Niklas Luhmann worked. Three kinds of note, kept apart:
| Kind | Says | Lifespan |
|---|---|---|
| Fleeting | A reminder that I had a thought | Days. Processed or thrown away |
| Literature | What a source says, briefly, in my words | Kept, filed with the source |
| Permanent | What I think, as one claim | Kept, and must stand without the source |
The failure he describes is treating all three alike: keeping every passing thought for ever, or collecting other people's sentences and calling it thinking.
In this vault
- A literature note is titled
📖 Author on subject. It is written from memory with the book shut, within a week of finishing or not at all. - A permanent note is titled
💎and then a sentence that could be wrong. No claim, no note. - Things I was merely taught, like this, go here among the concepts.
Often confused with: summaries and opinions. A literature note argues with its source at least once. A permanent note is finished when a stranger could read it cold.
My notes on the book: 📖 Ahrens on notes that outlive projects. The map for this whole corner: 04. 🗃️ Notes & Writing.
Where I have seen it
System four, autumn 2024. I abandoned it at 70 percent after reading Ahrens, because I could finally see what was wrong and it was not the folders. Every note in it was a mixture: half a quotation, half a reaction, no claim. None of them could be used for anything.
4 January, Lantern Coffee. I rewrote my 2024 notes on the book and wrote this record the same morning, before the first climb of the year.
The test I took from it is its own note: 💎 A note is finished when it can be read without its source. Dad's repair notebooks pass it. Most of my first three systems do not.
By the end of the year: fifty of each kind, which is about one a week, and more than systems one to four produced between them.