There was no syllabus. One question I could not answer, then whatever sat underneath it, and then underneath that.
This room is where that happens. It is my lab, and it is where I go to lose my mind.
The library is an environment, not a reading list. Several books open at once, left to talk to each other. Cicero next to Weizenbaum produces things neither one produces alone.
On the shelves right now: Roman history and the sources under it. Existentialism, through Buber before Sartre. Economics from opposing corners on purpose. Philosophy of technology. The history of computing. And the Culture novels.
Two wooden boxes. Several thousand index cards. Colored tabs. It looks like a filing system from 1958 because it is one.
It is on paper because paper is slow. Writing a card by hand forces me to say the thing in my own words. If I cannot write the card, I did not understand the passage.
The shape comes from Scott Scheper's Antinet Zettelkasten. A card is not filed under a subject decided in advance. It goes next to whatever it continues, and the structure branches as the thinking does.
The output is never a draft. It is a question.
This is my main workstation.
The newest station and the least finished.
I write about technology and did not want to do it entirely from the outside. A Raspberry Pi 5 is running. A six-node cluster is next. Alongside it, a rack of Android devices driven from one terminal, which exists because I want to know what breaks when you scale that.
I am publishing the ladder, not the summit.
Mortimer Adler called it syntopical reading: several books on the same question, open at once, read against each other rather than one after another. The argument happens between them, and that is where most of what I write about comes from.
Reading that way only works if I can find my place again, across five books, weeks later. The annotation system is how.
Marginalia first. I underline what lands and write the reaction beside it, including which other book it collides with. That note is what lets two books talk across the shelf.
Then the index. The inside back cover becomes a map of the book: a page number and three words. When a question sends me back, I start there, not at page one.
Then the commonplace book. The passages that survive get copied out by hand with the date, the source, the page, and a line on why. That is where threads from different books end up side by side.
Tabs go on reference books only. Novels never get them.
What follows is a portion of the library, grouped by subject. There is more on the shelves, and it keeps growing. Each title opens its own page.
The pleasure is in finding things out.
If something in that index suggests a book I am missing, tell me. I am most interested in the ones I would not find on my own, and in the case for why rather than the title alone. I read everything that comes in. I do not reply to everything.