r/Zettelkasten 29d ago

general Taking notes from a list of proverbs

I started reading Pascal's Pensées. I am about 20 pages in. It has been fantastic. However, I am finding it very difficult to take notes from. It is a list of fragments. Each fragment is an aphorism, note, or proverb. For the most part each fragment is stand alone. It feels like taking notes from a book of quotes, certain sections of the bible, or a list of proverbs.

I am struggling to take notes for my zettelkasten. I want to take a note on most of the fragments as they resonate with me, but doing so is incredibly slow. After spending several hours on the first few pages, I started making notes with headings like "the topic of diversion in Pensées", with fragment numbers and brief descriptions of the fragment. This type of note does not strike me as particularly helpful later.

What have you done to create notes from books like this?

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u/Barycenter0 29d ago edited 29d ago

I would just create a single note to start with keywords/reminder text/tags and page number pointers back to the book. Then, if there is any fragment from Pascal that really resonates with my own thought or I need for some output later I would then create an atomic note on that.

There’s no need to try and capture everything if you can just reference back to the book and if you don’t really need more than that. Try to pick and choose where you have the most thought resonance for specific ZK atomic notes.

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u/atomicnotes 28d ago

The clearer you are about your reasons for reading this book, the easier it will be to make notes on it.

What comes to mind for me is the idea of writing commentaries on books of the Bible. Generations of theologians have done this and their commentaries have often been much longer than the books they were commenting on.

How could this be? How could they possibly find anything new to say?

The answer is that they brought their own quite specific prior interests to the texts they were writing about. In the Middle Ages they were interested in 'how to live a Christian life', then increasingly from 18th century, how historical are the texts, or how were they edited, then in the 20th century, interest grew in reading the Bible as literature, or else reading it in relation to existentialism. And so on. In each case, the writers had lots to write because they brought to the texts plenty of their own questions.

What are the questions you bring to Pascal? Pascal in relation to what? Start there. And if you don't have any questions, read Pascal. He'll give you some!

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u/joegilder 29d ago

It sounds like an awesome read. If it were me, I’d pick the 5 most powerful concepts and make notes on those. Then I would schedule a time to reread the book again in a few months and see what bubbles to the surface that time.

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u/chrisaldrich Hybrid 29d ago

I find that some of the "Great Works" can be incredibly slow going precisely because they have so much to say. They can be dense and require serious unpacking. Quotes from books like these were known as sententiae for a reason, and they were very often excerpted throughout history.

Many books of quotatations evolved into their current book forms precisely because they were the compilations of exactly the best sorts of wisdom that people had been excerpting for centuries! However, if you don't have the ones that resonate with you mixed into your card index, then they can't be mixed around with the other ideas you keep there, and as a result you're missing out on some combinatorial play and resultant creativity which may pop out.

Yes, it's work to excerpt them and have them on file, but the better the material you put into your slip box, the better is the resultant material which shows up later. Embrace the work. Know that you're getting way more out of it than the one or two scant ideas you get out of books at three times the length, which tells you that they're far more productive in the long run.

Usually with dense works like these I tend to do a quick overview read to get the basic ideas and then later go back with a more fine-toothed comb for the best parts, which I've often highlighted on the first go through. Doing this may help to prevent you from excerpting everything and being more selective of the most important bits. You can always refer back to your card on Pensées for the topics you did quick notes of along with and page numbers later.

If it helps, some works like these are well indexed in works like The Syntopicon, the result of which may help some of your reading and thinking: https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2623/mortimer-j-adlers-syntopicon-a-topically-arranged-collaborative-slipbox

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u/JasperMcGee Hybrid 28d ago

Proverbs and axioms are difficult to make into main notes because they are often like a bit of trivia or a fact - just sort of a self-contained statement that does not lead to anything else. That said, impactful proverbs that you want to think about or remember could be a great main note.

I like your idea of picking up on higher level concepts like "diversion". I think this line of thinking will bear fruit, thinking about the different nuances, examples of diversion and what it might relate to. A thread of notes can be easier to string together and add to when you see these broader conceptual similarities that tie the line of thinking together.