your common place

a small notebook kept on the open web, tended slowly.

A page tended slowly.

last tended · 2026-05-13

A commonplace book is a personal notebook in which someone collects passages, observations, definitions, recipes, drawings, diagrams, and any other small thing worth keeping. The form is roughly five hundred years old and was, for a long time, how thinking people thought. This site is one of those, kept on the open web instead of in leather and thread.

The shape is intentional. A fixed-width page, a pinned column on the right for what's current, a slow log in the middle for what's been added. No infinite scroll, no algorithmic feed, no analytics. If you've landed here, you probably typed the URL.

Lately

A small chronological log of what's been added. Each entry is a date and one line — the shape matters more than any one item.

What's here

Notes

Short, evergreen, often updated. Not dated, not chronological. A garden of pages, each one a small idea worked on over time.

Browse all notes →

Essays

Longer pieces, dated, polished. One a month at most, sometimes one a year. The shape of the year shows up here.

Browse all essays →

An aside

Your commonplace book is the rough draft of the rest of your life. Keep it small. Keep it close. Re-read it. Add to it slowly. The shape that emerges, over years, will surprise you.

Quotes look like the above. Italic, light tan background, a small border on the left. Use them sparingly — once or twice a page is enough.

Reading

Currently

The Pattern Language · Christopher Alexander  ·  re-reading for the third time. The patterns about a small house hold up very well; the ones about the city, less so.

Recently

  • The Soul of a New Machine · Tracy Kidder
  • Working in Public · Nadia Asparouhova
  • The Glass Bead Game · Hermann Hesse
  • How to Take Smart Notes · Sönke Ahrens

Why a website at all

The open web is the last place where you can keep a piece of writing visible to strangers without an algorithm deciding who sees it, an advertiser deciding what's around it, or a platform deciding when to delete it. That is genuinely rare. Owning a small page on it — slow, plain, hand-tended — is one of the cheapest and most durable acts of cultural participation a person can do.