[How About This Book] Why Do Thoughts Always Begin at the Edge of the Page?

Hektor Haarkötter’s “Cultural History of the Note”

From Vinci to Luhmann: Notes Capture Traces of Thought, Not Just Memory

Among the posthumous papers of Swiss writer Robert Walser, there were 526 strange pieces of paper. He packed minuscule handwriting, smaller than grains of sand, onto scraps like calendar pieces, postcards, envelopes, and the margins of printed matter, all with a pencil. At first, they were thought to be encrypted. Once deciphered, they turned out to contain poems, prose, plays, and even a hidden full-length novel. It was a kind of ‘pencil system’ that Walser developed in the 1920s during a period of writer’s block. He wrote small in order to write at all; it was this very smallness that let him write again. Are notes, then, insignificant by-products on the opposite side of finished writing, or are they the freest form of writing, existing only before it is decided what a piece of writing might become?

It is precisely this small medium that the German communication scholar Hektor Haarkötter obsessively tracks across more than 700 pages in his “Cultural History of the Note.” As he puts it, the human mind does not operate like a report or dissertation. Thoughts pop up suddenly, jump to strange places, and break off without context or order. In that sense, a crumpled scrap of paper likely resembles thinking more than a neatly constructed sentence ever could.

Leonardo da Vinci serves as a prime example. The ‘Codex Arundel,’ held in the British Library, is a disorganized mixture of science, machines, art, and personal records, scribbled without any clear order. Da Vinci himself called it an ‘unordered collection’ copied from various papers. He once declared he would organize it by subject later, but that ‘later’ never really arrived. What’s interesting is precisely this failure. In the 283 unorganized sheets, later generations glimpse not the mind of an orderly genius, but of one in motion.

The main characters in this book—from Renaissance commonplaces books collecting miscellaneous quotes and thoughts, to Wittgenstein’s differently kept philosophical and personal notebooks, to Arno Schmidt’s index cards, and even Walser’s micrograms—are generally not those who finished their thinking, but those who scattered thoughts along the way. To Haarkötter, notes are therefore not a warehouse of memory—in fact, quite the opposite. We do not write them down to remember, but to safely forget. The moment you write down a phone number, you no longer need to memorize it; once you jot down your to-do list, you can erase it from your mind.

Otto’s notebook, referenced by philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers in 1998 to describe the ‘extended mind’ thesis, also fits this framework. For Otto, who has a memory impairment, his ever-present notebook is not just a tool for helping memory but is in fact part of his memory itself. Where does the brain end and the page begin? The longer you study notes, the blurrier this boundary becomes.

Perhaps the most fascinating person in this book is the sociologist Niklas Luhmann. Over about 40 years, he created roughly 90,000 index cards. What’s important is not the number—90,000—but that he did not lock these cards away in subject drawers. Instead, he made them reference and interact with one another. Each new note could connect with existing ones, and new notes could wedge in between, revealing completely unforeseen paths. Today, the Luhmann Archive calls his Zettelkasten at the core of his theoretical work a kind of ‘intellectual autobiography.’ Luhmann didn’t transfer complete ideas from his head onto cards; he arrived at those ideas through interaction with the cards themselves.

Niklas Luhmann, German Sociologist. Wikidata

Francis Bacon didn’t even need a box. At his studio at 7 Reece Mews in London, more than 7,000 objects—photos, magazines, books, torn canvases, paint cans—were unearthed as if by excavation. The Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin reconstructed everything: floors, walls, and ceiling. Outwardly, it looked like a junkyard, but to Bacon, the chaos was not external to his work. Paintings began where images were stepped on, flipped by accident, or placed beside others by chance. Seen through Haarkötter’s eyes, the entire studio becomes a massive three-dimensional notepad. By this point, ‘notes’ as described in this book are far removed from physical objects like sticky notes or smartphone apps; doodles on a wall, words scratched into a cell floor, a painter’s messy studio—all are notes.

Sometimes, though, the definition becomes too broad. The author’s statement—“Media exists not for memory, but for forgetting”—is striking, but may be too elegant a phrase to apply to all records. When the book was published in Germany, some pointed out that this theory repeats itself and hastily pushes exceptions aside for the sake of attractive propositions. In reality, people leave notes both to forget and not to forget. The very fact that Walser’s paper scraps survived for a century is proof of that.

Even so, rather than spoil the book, this overstatement leaves us with a question. Today, our smartphones store thousands of photos, screenshots, ‘Send to Myself’ messages on KakaoTalk, unopened Notion pages, and endless lines in memo apps. Storage space is now effectively infinite—and yet, curiously, we do not remember much better. That’s because merely having stored something substitutes for actually remembering. AI takes this one step further: it not only stores, but organizes, summarizes, and composes sentences for us. Paradoxically, perhaps the most precious thing left to humans is, in fact, the unorganized state.

A fragment of thought that has no meaning yet, is unclassified, and its connections are unknown—by efficiency standards, that is mere noise. But in the history of creativity, this noise has often been the beginning. After reading “Cultural History of the Note,” you may find it difficult to throw away a single scrap of paper on your desk. Not because it holds a great idea, but precisely because it remains in a state that is neither great nor useless—at least, not yet.

Cultural History of the Note | Written by Hektor Haarkötter | Translated by Kim Ingeon | Arte

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.