Stendhal might have spent the night in a building near where I live.

There is a plaque on the wall of the building — a bookstore now, specializing in French literature — memorializing the night that Stendhal is said to have stayed there.

With its bilingual inscription and bas relief portrait of the artist, the plaque brings some kind of life to that corner, projecting a line clear to a far side of Europe.

Something of French culture once comforted itself here, if you can imagine.

You’ll have to imagine.

The plaque does not cite its sources. It does not quote from the writer. It does not paint a picture of an event, a time, or a place.

ŠIAME NAME … BUVO APSISTOJES … STENDALIS

DANS CETTE MAISON STENDHAL … FIT ETAPE

Where would one look if one were inclined to dig up the truth of what may or may not have happened in this or another place at this or that time so many decades, centuries since?

But then, who would care to doubt these chiseled records?

All told, the plaque is less a statement of fact than one of values.

“Draw this place closer, in your mind, to what you might already know well,” it says.

“Comfort yourself, that you are not so far away, so disconnected, as you thought—as you might have feared.”

In some letters Stendhal notes his passing, while marching with Napoleon’s army, through various cities and towns in the region. His remarks are spare, revealing an experience of dismal early winter and little else.¹

There is no good way to write an essay.

But there are several bad ways.

Too common, I think, is the impulse to open up a fresh document in Microsoft Word — or Google Docs, or LibreOffice¹ — and begin banging away at whatever process has worked in the past.

That process — whether it be freewriting, or transcribing, or listing, or outlining — might be effective, or it might not.

But the forum in which that process takes place all-too-often — the blank white simulated piece of paper — is certainly not doing you any favors.

I once saw the great Ted Nelson² give a talk (screed) in a library, in which he denounced (railed against) the usage of the term “desktop” in personal computing.

How many desktops, he asked (shouted), are positioned vertically in front of you?

Similarly: do you really need to type out your essay’s fledgling stages on something that looks like a piece of paper³ just because that’s the particular physicality that your essay will take on later?

Let’s be honest, though — your essay will never take on the physicality of a piece of paper.

Because you’re not going to print your essay out on paper.

You’re just going to email it to someone, who is also not going to print it out on paper.

Do me a favor:⁴

1. Open TextEdit (on MacOS) or Notepad (on Windows).

2. Start your essay-writing process, whatever that might entail.

3. Reflect.

How does it feel to be writing in a space ungoverned by the arbitrary geometries of the US Letter or A4 sheet?⁵

Do you feel liberated? No? Well, give it a minute.

If you’ve enabled “Word Wrap” (Notepad) or “Wrap to Page” (TextEdit) try resizing the window so you can only see the few sentences you’re working on. How does that feel?

Liberating? No? Then try something else.

The point here is not to prescribe a way of writing but rather to prompt the shaking loose of the notion of prescription.

There is no straight line through the production of an essay and, accordingly, no good reason why a process as messy and full of switchbacks as writing tends to be should take place on the image of a facsimile of a white piece paper.

In any case, you can always paste your draft into Word later.

Reading without taking notes is as good as not reading at all.

Think of the last text you read — a book, a chapter, an article, a blog post.

What do you remember about it?

What do you remember more clearly:

                    a) The text itself.
                    b) The circumstances in which you read it.
                    c) The feeling of accomplishment that came over you when you finished reading.

I, for one, do not remember the last book I read. (Or the last article, chapter, or blog post.)

Maybe I remember a title, a general topic, an author’s name — sometimes more.
But that one anecdote on such-and-such a page? The footnote with all the citations that seemed so promising? The statement of argument a third of the way through the introduction?

They’re gone. Like they never existed. And like we, therefore, never encountered each other.

Whenever I am reading something that I find to be of significant moment — something compelling, inciting, good — I make a text file on my computer.

In that file, I take notes on whatever strikes me about what I am reading. Beside each note, I write a page number. It ends up looking something like this:

[40]: Crusoe arrives on the island.
[72]: RC can’t believe there’s corn growing.
[75]: Can we consider this an immaculate corn-ception?

Sometimes I type direct quotes from the text. But often I only describe, in a few words, what is being discussed on a given page: analysis of a primary or secondary source, discussion of a concept, definition of a key term.

Later when I need to recall some details about something I’ve read, I’ve got a clear and easily accessible record of my reading.¹

What makes this process distinct, noteworthy, worthy of note? The following precept, which I try as hard as possible to adhere to:

That’s right. No underlining, no highlighting, no notes in the margins.

This is not in the interest of keeping a clean original document, digital or otherwise.

No — it is to prevent me from feeling like some work has been done when, in reality, no work has been done.

Underlining and highlighting feel great. They are easy. They feel like an accomplishment. But once you close a book or pdf, what do you have? Quickly fading memories.

Sure, you have books and pdfs full of marks. But to get to those marks, you’ll have to go back to the books/pdfs themselves — if you can find them.

And then, what do those marks really mean?

You’ll have to read the underlined/highlighted portions of text again in order to understand them.

And then, if you’re like me — and I assume you are — you will wonder half the time why you thought a passage was worth underlining/highlighting in the first place.

Why do a lot of extra work later when you can do a little extra work now?

I know the answer to this question, of course. It’s because you’re the now you, and you don’t care about the later you, and all the work that they may or may not have to do. Let them figure it out.

They’re going to be so mad…