“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
— Soren Kierkegaard

Literature is here as another discipline of attention: a place to think about how language, form, and memory shape the way a book is understood.

Emphases

  • close reading
  • style, rhetoric, and form
  • literary history and intellectual context
  • relations between text, memory, and thought

Use

This section can hold reading notes, brief commentaries, excerpts worth returning to, and reflections on works that matter to the larger life of the notebook.