Notes on “Wrestling with text”

Transcribed and somewhat fleshed out from notes on yellow A5 notebook, on 31.3.2025.

“Wresting with text” cannot happen on the text itself, or in marginalia. A separate space and scaffolding is needed. LiquidText provides that in the form of the “workspace”; in reading physical books, we must supplement them with something that provides ample space for wrestling. This is not a notebook: a notebook is too difficult to hold open, is far from portable, and triggers certain existential problems of knowledge management. 1-to-1, many-to-1 matching with books is also not possible, nor is carrying notes physically alongside books. It’s all a bunch of tradeoffs, but the best one is either several A5-folded sheets of A4 paper (100 gr or heavier) or large-ish index cards.
“Dot system” markings and corresponding notes (1-2 sentences long, “seeds” / titles of not-quite-evergreen notes) do not provide good enough fidelity for wrestling, nor do they help paint a faithful picture of a book’s content. They end up being a mere elaboration of the dot markings, at best 1-to-1 forced seeds for evergreen notes. But there is an impedance mismatch here. A further abstraction layer is needed for evergreen notes to be truly permanent - the initial notes can only be the material, the staging ground for this abstraction, not the note titles, not almost-the-notes-themselves waiting to be fleshed out or written in one's own words.
Verbatim quoting / marking / excerpting of text misses the point, because:
- paragraphs, sections, pages, chapters, whole books have ~charges~ that are not possible to express through any direct quotation.
- Markings are often arbitrary - they do not apply to tightly defined text ranges, nor should they. The sequentiality of reading also affects the logic of marking-as-you-read.
- There is no such thing as “the information in a text” - reading is an act of creation of information. You cannot possibly access and retrieve 100% of the “information content” of a piece of writing.
I now almost always read-with-an-eye-towards-something (writing), read with a concrete purpose, “a bucket of attention” (Somers) rather than surrendering to the author’s arguments and book’s content (which is what I used to do). This kind of reading sometimes involves “exploratory reading” (TODO: what is the Adler term?) - not necessarily line-by-line reading, and this kind of reading is not served well by “point 1, point 2, …” kind of marking. I have my own ~charge~ while reading, too.
I don’t want what is left behind by a reading experience to be a bunch of lifeless marks and annotations that I will be completely alien to after a while. What do I want it to be? Writing. I need to write from the text to understand the text anyway.
It’s impossible internalize a text without writing from it - but even that is beside the point, because internalizing texts is ultimately a fake goal. “Retention” is fake. Who needs “better retention”? Those are side effects to what must be the main course: Writing, insight, creation.
Open question: How to pick up “practical useful information” from a book regardless of all this - like facts, surprise points, bibliographical information, further reading, prompts, etc.