The Unspoken Concordance: On the Private Language of a Personal Index
I was recently asked a question that stopped me short: ‘When you create an index in the back of a book, who are you writing it for?’ The answer seemed obvious at first. For me, of course. It is a tool for my own future use, a map to retrace my steps through an author’s argument or a narrative’s winding path. But the more I considered the question, the more I realised the index is not merely a retrieval system. It is a private language, a coded concordance of a mind at work in a specific text at a specific moment in time.
We speak of a ‘personal index,’ but the phrase doesn’t quite capture the intimacy of the act. This is not the public, polished index crafted by a professional for a published volume, designed for universal utility. This is something far more idiosyncratic. It is a record of a conversation, and like any good conversation, it is filled with shorthand, inside jokes, and sudden, passionate digressions. The entries are not just topics; they are emotional waypoints. You might find ‘Cicero’s vanity’ listed next to ‘Roman road construction,’ because in your reading, the two ideas collided to form a new, private insight about the relationship between infrastructure and ego.
This language evolves and becomes more cryptic, more personal, with each volume. A simple page number is rarely enough. It is annotated with a ‘cf.’ for ‘compare,’ a ‘!’ for a startling revelation, or a ‘?’ for a lingering doubt. The index becomes a second layer of marginalia, a distilled echo of the scribbles in the margins. It is where the fleeting thoughts from the front of the book are gathered, cross-referenced, and given a permanent address. The act of creating it is an act of slow, deliberate synthesis. It forces you to review, to condense, to see the connections between disparate pages that you read weeks apart.
And this is why the question of audience is so poignant. You are indeed writing it for your future self, but for a stranger. The you of five or ten years hence will have forgotten the specific emotional resonance of that ‘!’ next to a particular passage on page 143. They will encounter their own private language as a mild mystery, a series of clues left behind by a previous tenant of their mind. The index becomes an archive of a past self’s engagement, a fossilised record of a reader’s unique dance with a text. It is, in the end, a letter to who you will become, written in a code only you can partially break, a testament to the beautiful, solitary craft of building a mind, one book, and one curious entry, at a time.
Notes & further reading
A few pages I came back to while writing this: