HOW TO SCRIBBLE READING NOTES…IN THE SOCRATIC WAY

At OnlineGreatBooks many people from around the world are reading the Great Books and meeting in small groups for monthly discussions on Zoom. They are generally following the chronological scheme outlined by Hutchins and Adler. I have the good fortune to host a few of those monthly Great Conversations. The mix of people is startlingly diverse, from young people to retired folks like me, from physicians to nurses, from nuclear scientists to oil rig workers, from airline pilots to active military, from building contractors to plumbers, from atheists to priests, from bankers to high school dropouts, from home schoolers to prep schoolers, from body builders to whiskey connoisseurs.

When you start to work your way through the Great Books, you unhappily discover that your ability to take good notes gets severely challenged. Great Books are never easy books. You start with the Iliad and have to figure out a way to remember the names of all those warriors and all those gods. And lots of stuff happens on every page. How are you supposed to remember everything? Sometimes questions or ideas occur to you. Why is Agamemnon such a jerk? Is Tom Brady more like Achilles or Hector? Words and phrases like “rosy fingered dawn” keep showing up. What should you write down?

When you get to Herodotus History, things can seem totally out of control. Hundred of pages full of hundreds of unfamiliar names and dates and places peppered with highly entertaining digressions on rivers and giant ants. How could you ever pass a multiple choice test after one or even ten readings? Well, maybe you shouldn’t.

In Adler’s How to Read A Book, he recommends, somewhat scandalously, writing notes in the margins of the books and underlining important words and phrases. He also suggests writing a brief summary of the key points and definitions of key terms. Some of the Great Books people use the Cornell method that they learned in school, dividing a sheet in two columns, one for a paginated index of anything you want to remember, the other column for your own comments and key division markers. Others use Ryan Holliday’s and Robert Greene’s variation on the old Commonplace Books where you note anything of interest on index cards, a system likely borrowed from high school research paper courses. A few people take the index card system even further, trying to follow Nicholas Luhrman’s Zettelkasten, a sophisticated filing system. Indeed, note taking systems can be a little dangerous to people who border on Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (that would be me). We suffer too much from fear of forgetting. We probably collected baseball cards as kids.

The temptation of the Cornell methods is to take too many notes. You suddenly have reams of notebook pages full of names, snatches of dialogue, epithets, little summaries, questions…in two columns! By the time we’ve put the “meaning of the book” in our own words, our notes are almost as long as the book itself! How do you find that compelling scene with Andromache? The same can hold true with index cards. It’s easy to create a stack big enough for Triple Solitaire. Here’s one card for a vocabulary word, here’s another card with a great description of a battle death, and here’s the number of Achaean ships, by origin, and….

I haven’t even touched on all the new digital alternatives for taking and organizing reading notes. Just shoot a picture of anything you want to remember. Or try Evernote and then combine it with….

I fear that as long as we search for an ideal system for notetaking, we are doomed to failure. Why? Because the best way to take notes for any endeavor will depend on what you want to do with those notes.

This can even get more befuddling if you are trying to integrate your reading notes with all the other kinds of writing and learning and performing you may do. Do you keep a journal? Write stories? Prepare meetings at work? Give speeches? Collect butterflies? (Nabakov did and also wrote his novels on index cards. Hmmm.)

What is a note, anyway? Notes help us remember stuff. And we want to remember stuff so we can answer questions. We want those answers to help us accomplish things in life. The quality and relevance of our notes will depend on the quality and relevance of our questions!

So, let’s suppose that we are reading a novel, say, Cervantes’ Don Quixote. What notes, if any, should I take? Imagine you are reading it for a bookclub, and you are going to have a discussion of the book over port and brie next month. Do you need to take any notes? Well, what will you need to be an active participant in the discussion? You will probably need to remember the basic story, what we might call the plot. The problem is that this book is over a thousand pages long. Lots of stuff happens. That’s why they call it “picaresque.” You’ll probably want to remember the names of the characters in the story…except there are several hundred!

What you need to recall may also depend on the nature of the book group. If everyone at the gathering is an academic who speaks Spanish, well good luck playing “Smartest Guy in the Room.”

In our Great Book conversations we try to stay focused on the book under discussion, because that is the book we all share. We try to avoid bringing in outside expertise. Yet a chat about Cervantes certainly invites comparisons to Shakespeare and Montaigne and Sterne and Joyce. Where do we draw the lines.Or do we need to?

This is where Socrates can help us. When we are reading, we must address two sets of questions. First, there are the questions that the book addresses, whatever the genre. Second, there are the questions that are important to us. Third, there are the questions that other readers of the book have asked. The overlap of those questions is where the magic lies for the pleasure and enlightenment of reading and conversation.

This simple socratic insight has led me to organize my reading and my notes for just about everything by questions. I like to think of questions and answers as if they were shots in a movie. Some shots give us a panoramic picture of the whole scene, some shots have the camera move with the action, some shots focus our attention on some kind of physical or verbal interaction, some shots go in for the close up of a detail, and some shots get tricky, peeking over a shoulder. The point is that questions, like movie shots, always have a scope and a depth and an angle…drawing and following the viewer’s interest. A reading note is really a way to triangulate on a passage or idea.

So, for Don Quixote, I write down brief answers and copy passages that address panoramic questions like: What is the overall event or change that holds the story together? Don Quixote comes in two volumes, which also include reference to an original source and also a rip-off story by someone other than Cervantes. And the story itself includes several tales, one the length of a novella, told by one of the characters in the book. (Now we know where Faulkner stole those infuriating narratives.) How do you summarize this complex tome?

Well, underlying all those pages and all that complexity is a relatively simple story, beginning with a man in his fifties deciding to become a knight errant and then proceeding to find a squire called Sancho. They embark on several quests, inspired somehow by Quixote’s fantasy woman named Dulcinea. Family and friends in his hometown worry that he has gone crazy. The people he meets on his quests respond to his wild claims with anything from hostility to exploitation to games of let’s pretend to actual attempts to help.Finally Quixote’s friends and family get him home where he dies in bed, surrounded by people who love him but questioning the value of his adventures. The various ways different characters in the story respond to Don Quixote’s actions provides a panoply of issues and ideas from from the metaphysical (how do any of us know what’s real) to the political (the power of the king and aristocracy to Spain’s expulsion of Moors) to the power of love (amorous and practical) to the nature of friendship and loyalty to…just about anything you want to talk about over a glass of wine.

Your panoramic summary would surely be different than mine, but both of us would have a version of the big story and the elements in that story of particular relevance to ourselves. The point is that despite the novel’s length and complexity, each of us can summarize our idea of what the novel is about in a few sentences that would fit on a couple of index cards. And our panoramic summary says as much about us as it does the book we are reading.

We would probably also want to write down a description of passages in the book that somehow impressed us the most…the things you want to discuss close-up. Why would we need more than a dozen, unless we were working on our own book? Good idea to jot down the page numbers of our citations or quotes.

If we aremaking a systematic study of the book, we might also want to write index card length summaries of each chapter…over 150 of those mid shots for DonQuixote. Some books, like some events, require only a few snapshots. Others, like weddings or a new baby, require an album. Let the purpose of your reading drive the questions you need to address in your notes.

Who and what are the people, places, conflicts, actions, ideas and language that drive the central event in the story? What questions does it provoke and explore in the story? How is it similar to other great stories that came before or after? Different?

Don Quixote, like the Decammeron or Canterbury Tales contains many stories within the the key overall frame of Don Quixote’s adventures. For a simple discussion of the book I did not think I needed to account for each of those stories so much as ask a question concerning the overall role of all these stories that lie within the DonQuixote story. Both books and people tend to be the sum of their stories.

As a rule, whether our question is panoramic or close up, we can answer each of these questions briefly on its own index card or half sheet of paper. We can also list about ten key passages and their page numbers on one or two cards or slips. And I can write additional answers to additional questions I think might be interesting to me or to the reading group, including some of my own thoughts or comparisons.

You might well ask different questions than I do. Great. Won’t we have a wonderful conversation sharing our views on the questions we share and enlightening each other on questions that did not occur to us.

So, the procedure works like this: When I read a book, I read through quickly so I can enjoy the story or follow the argument without much worry about notes. When I encounter something I might want to recall later(a person, place, thing, passage, vocabulary word, etc) I just put a check mark in the margin. For Don Quixote I had hundreds of check marks. When I “finish” the book, I decide on the key questions I think I will need for my purposes. I make a list on an index card. I’ll want to remember the names of the key characters, so I’ll take an index card, label it KEY CHARACTERS?, look through all my check marks and list them on a card or two, with the page number where they were first introduced. I’ll do the same for new vocabulary words, the overall plot outline, short list of back stories with their key characters, etc. Since DonQuixote is such a long and rich book, I think I ended up with about twenty or thirty cards, each with its own question and answer. Since each card is limited to one specific question, I can flip through the cards easily to find something quickly or to review before a conversation. If I were “studying” the book or wanting to write an essay about it, I would use the appropriate questions for those purposes. Again, organizing by questions allows me great flexibility while giving me strength of focus. Also, I must page through the book reviewing my check marks for each question and answer card. This repetition provides a thorough review and memory enhancement. I usually save my list of key passages for last, because by then I have a pretty good idea of what I want to share with others.

When I am done with the book and my notes, I put the cards or slips in an envelope with the name of the author and book title. If I go back to the book for another read, I’ll review my previous notes and perhaps write a few additional thoughts.

Please observe that the Socratic way of note taking is not wedded to cards, slips, or any particular medium. I have come to believe those choices are highly driven by personal experience, technical expertise, and taste. If each note focuses on one question, then whatever the medium, your notes will be easy to sort and arrange in the order you want. What is key: organizing by questions and answers. How do you determine the questions? That depends on what you intend to do with your experience of the book.

Of course, not all books are novels. Different kinds of books invite us to ask different kinds of questions as we read them.

The good thing about this method is that it encourages us to organize our ideas by the questions we think the book evokes or provokes. Each book becomes our own Socrates, challenging us about the way we see our world and what we think is important. Great books have a way of opening our minds to the great questions and the important answers given by whe world’s best thinkers and writers. The significant questions are never in some teacher’s multiple choice test. The big questions are deep in your psyche, yearning to be set free with the help of great writers and thinkers…and that second glass of wine.

The Socratic question/answer way of organizing notes and information has many applications beyond taking notes, from journaling to planning, from writing to problem solving. Indeed, writing down questions and answers is a great way to pick your own brain. How do you even know what you think until you write it down. We can discuss these questions and answers in other Socratic Scribblings. And then we have to find a way to organize all these notes we might write…journals, projects, dream diaries, ideas for books and articles, math problems….When it comes to note taking systems, I suspect we are all tilting at windmills.