How Not to Forget What Matters

During the first two centuries of the Roman Empire, there spread a practice known as hypomnēmata, a type of notetaking system, used as a tool for meditation, [1] in which the writer would store quotes from books they had read. Each day, often in the morning, the notetaker would open their notebook and look for a passage relevant to something they were struggling with, and then they would meditate on that—unpacking it, making the idea top of mind, ensuring it was alive in them.

A suggestion repeated in several popular manuals for living was that you should collect every snippet of thought that deeply inspires you to live in a more ethically true way and then, in the pre-dawn hour, look through your hypomnēmata to find passages relevant to your current situation—insightful quotes, examples, actions you had witnessed, notes from conversations you’d had, and so on [2] —and meditate, in writing, on those that help you orient toward your current challenges, until you feel inspired to act in the proper way. [3]

I first came across the idea of using hypomnēmata in this way eight years ago when a friend sent me a copy of Foucault’s “Self-writing.” In the essay, Foucault talks about hypomnēmata and other modes of reading and writing used to fashion a self during the Hellenistic and Imperial eras. I didn’t pick up the practice in its full form. But rereading the essay now, I realize how much it has influenced how I write: my essays are (often) meditations I do in order to deepen core ideas I want to live by, and to strengthen parts of myself I want strengthened.

I have often noticed that my experience of reality improves if I write and think about something.