The Unkept Garden: On the Anarchic Pleasures of Unsystematic Notes

We are, in our reading lives, a culture obsessed with cultivation. To read a book is no longer a solitary act; it is a project. We approach a text armed with a system, a methodology designed to tame the wilds of prose and extract its nutrients with maximum efficiency. We deploy index cards, elaborate digital databases, colour-coded highlighters, and a litany of acronymic techniques promising to turn reading into a harvest. The promise, implicit in every guide to "smart note-taking," is that chaos is the enemy. That a system is the only path to true understanding. I have come to question this received wisdom; I have come to find a quiet rebellion in the unkept garden of my unsystematic notes.

My own notebooks are a disgrace to the orderly mind. They are not archives but palimpsests. A quotation from Marcus Aurelius shares a page with a hastily scribbled grocery list. An insight gleaned from a biography of Leonora Carrington bleeds into the margins of a thought about fixing a leaky tap. There are sketches, phone numbers without names, and fragments of dreams captured in the blue-grey light before dawn. For years, I viewed this mess as a personal failing, a sign of an intellect too scattered to adhere to the rigorous taxonomies of Zettelkasten or the bullet journal’s clean grids.

But lately, I’ve noticed something. The very lack of system is what makes these notes fertile ground. Because my filing system is, essentially, non-existent, I am forced to re-read. In searching for a specific reference, my eyes stumble across a forgotten line from a novel, placed unexpectedly beside a note on mediaeval monasticism. The friction created by this juxtaposition—this accidental adjacency—generates a spark that a carefully categorized note could never produce. The system, for all its virtues, siloes ideas. My chaos allows them to mingle, to breed, to create unforeseen alliances.

This is not to champion simple sloppiness, but rather to defend a different kind of order: an organic, emergent one. The connections in my notebook are not pre-determined by a hierarchy of topics and subtopics. They are formed by the happenstance of my life, by the contiguity of my curiosities on a given Tuesday afternoon. The link between a poetic image and a scientific fact, when discovered by accident years later, feels less like a product of my own cleverness and more like a gift from a past self I barely remember. It is a form of serendipity I actively curate by refusing to curate.

The tyranny of the perfect system is that it risks making the note-taking process more important than the reading itself. The goal becomes the flawless organization of information, a kind of intellectual trophy case. But the truer purpose of note-taking, at least for me, is not to build a searchable external hard drive for the brain. It is to deepen the conversation between the reader and the read. It is to leave a trail of one’s intellectual and emotional engagement, a trail that is often meandering, backtracking, and gloriously inefficient. My notebooks are not a library. They are a wilderness, and it is in the untamed undergrowth that the most surprising thoughts are found.

Notes & further reading

A few pages I came back to while writing this: