Rank and File
But seeing the shape of your ideas is not the same as having new ideas, and in fact — as with the ossification of keywords — creating a too-comprehensive portrait of your own thoughts can amount to locking yourself into a labyrinth of your own preconceptions. Instead my notes were beginning to depress me. They were a visible testament of fruitless effort. To my horror, it turned out to be a chaotic mess that would never have passed muster under my own dissertation director. It read, in my opinion, like something written by a sentient library catalog, full of disordered and tangential insights, loosely related to one another — very interesting, but hardly a model for my own academic work. but I had to admit that once again my attempts to disrupt thinking with a technology of note-taking had only resulted in an enormous, useless accumulation of busywork. I finally had to acknowledge that something had been wrong about the advice I received so many years before: a scholar’s notes were not a life’s work, but only a tool.
