On Keeping a Notebook

There is a particular kind of quiet that comes from filling a page. Not the quiet of an empty room, but the quiet of attention — the world narrowing to the width of a sentence.

I have kept notebooks for as long as I can remember, and almost none of what I wrote in them was worth keeping. That was never the point. The point was the keeping itself: the daily insistence that a thought, once caught, deserves a line of its own.

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. — Joan Didion

This essay collection is set in Newsreader, an editorial serif with generous italics, on a sepia page. It is meant to feel written rather than typed — the difference between a letter and a form.

A note on what belongs here

Essays are for the slow ideas. The ones that don’t fit in a code block and don’t need a diagram. If a piece needs syntax highlighting or a chart, it probably belongs in Tech Posts instead.