There were about eleven thousand of them [four-by-six slips of note pad paper in four long card-catalog-type trays]. They’d grown out of almost four years of organizing and reorganizing and reorganizing so many time he’d become dizzy trying to fit them all together. He’d just about given up.

Their overall subject he called a ‘Metaphysics of Quality,’ or sometimes a ‘Metaphysics of Value’.

His main task was to get it [the new material] processed before it log-jammed his head into some kind of a block that he couldn’t get out of. Now the main purpose of the slips was not to help him remember anything. It was to help him forget it. That sounded contradictory but the purpose was to keep his head empty, to put all his ideas of the past four years … where he didn’t have to think of them.

The reason Phaedrus used slips rather than full-sized sheets of paper is that a card-catalog tray full of slips provides a more random access. When information is organized in small chunks that can be accessed and sequenced at random it becomes much more valuable than when you have to take it in serial form.

Some of the slips were actually about this topic: random access and Quality. The two are closely related. Random access is at the essence of organic growth … cities are based on random access. Democracies are founded on it.

And so while those trays certainly didn’t have much glamour they nevertheless had the hidden strength of a card catalog. They ensured that by keeping his head empty and keeping sequential formatting to a minimum, no fresh new unexplored idea would be forgotten or shut out.

Because he didn’t pre-judge the fittingness of new ideas or try to put them in order but just let them flow in, these ideas sometimes came in so fast he couldn’t write them down quickly enough. The subject matter, a whole metaphysics, was so enormous the flow had turned into an avalanche. The slips kept expanding in every direction so that the more he saw the more he saw there was to see.

There’d been times when an urge surfaced to take the slips, pile by pile, and file them into the door of the coal stove on top of the glowing charcoal briquets and then close the door and listen to the cricking of the metal as they turned into smoke. Then it would all be gone and he would be really free again.

Except that he wouldn’t be free. It would still be there in his mind to do.

So he spent most of his time submerged in chaos, knowing that the longer he put off setting into a fixed organization the more difficult it would become. But he felt sure that sooner or later some sort of a format would have to emerge and it would be a better one for his having waited.

Eventually this belief was justified. Periods started to appear when he just sat there for hours and no [new] slips came in – and this, he saw, was the last time for organizing. He was pleased to discover that the slips themselves made this organizing much easier. Instead of asking ‘Where does this metaphysics of the universe begin?’ – which was a virtually impossible question – all he had to do was just hold up two slips and ask, ‘Which comes first?’ This was easy and he always seemed to get an answer. Then he would take a third slip, compare it with the first one, and ask again, ‘Which comes first?’ If the new slip came after the first one he compared it with the second. Then he had a three-slip organization. He kept repeating the process with slip after slip.

Before long he noticed certain categories emerging. The earlier slips began to merge about a common topic and later slips about a different topic. When enough slips merged about a single topic so that he got a feeling it would be permanent he took an index card of the same size as the slips, attached a transparent plastic index tab to it, wrote the name of the topic on a little cardboard insert that came with the tab, put it in the tab, and put the index card together with its related topic slips. The trays … now had about four or five hundred of these tabbed index cards.

At various times he’d tried all kinds of different things: colored plastic tabs to indicate subtopics and sub-subtopics; stars to indicate relative importance; slips split with a line to indicate both emotive and rational aspects of their subject; but all of these had increased rather than decreased confusion and he’d found it clearer to include their information elsewhere.

There were no rules for doing it and no way of predicting how it would progress.

In addition to the topic categories, five other categories had emerged. Phaedrus felt these were of great importance:

The first was UNASSIMILATED. This contained new ideas that interrupted what he was doing. They came in on the spur of the moment while he was organizing the other slips or sailing or working on the boat or doing something else that didn’t want to be disturbed. Normally your mind says to these ideas, ‘Go away, I’m busy,’ but that attitude is deadly to Quality. The UNASSIMILATED pile helped solve the problem. He just stuck the slips there on hold until he had the time and desire to get them.

The next non-topical category was called PROGRAM. PROGRAM slips were instructions for what to do with the rest of the slips. They kept track of the forest while he was busy thinking about individual trees. With more than ten-thousand trees that kept wanting to expand to one-hundred thousand the PROGRAM slips were absolutely necessary to keep from getting lost.

What made them so powerful was that they too were on slips, one slip for each instruction. This meant the PROGRAM slips were random access too and could be changed and resequenced as the need arose without any difficulty. He remembered reading that John Von Newmann, an inventor of the computer, had said the single thing that makes a computer so powerful is that the program is data and can be treated like any other data.

The next slips were the CRIT slips. These were for days when he woke up in a foul mood and could find nothing but fault everywhere. He knew from experience that if he threw stuff away on these days he would regret it later, so instead he satisfied his anger by just describing all the stuff he wanted to destroy and the reasons for destroying it. The CRIT slips would then wait for days or sometimes months for a calmer period when he could make a more dispassionate judgment.

The next to the last group was the TOUGH category. This contained slips that seemed to say something of importance but didn’t fit into any topic he could think of. It prevented getting stuck on some slip whose place might become obvious later on.

The final category was JUNK. These were slips that seemed of high value when he wrote them down but which now seemed awful. Sometimes it included duplicates of slips he had forgotten he’d written. These duplicates were thrown away but nothing else was discarded. He’d found over and over again that the junk pile is a working category. Most slips died there but some reincarnated, and some of these reincarnated slips were the most important ones he had.

Actually, these last two piles, JUNK and TOUGH, were the piles that gave him the most concern. The whole thrust of the organizing effort was to have as few of these as possible. When they appeared he had to fight the tendency to slight them, shove them under the carpet, throw them out the window, belittle them, and forget them. These were the underdogs, the outsiders, the pariahs, the sinners of his system. But the reason he was so concerned about them was that he felt the quality and strength of his entire system of organization depended on how he treated them. If he treated the pariahs well he would have a good system. If he treated them badly he would have a weak one. They could not be allowed to destroy all efforts at organization but he couldn’t allow himself to forget them either. They just stood there, accusing, and he had to listen.

The hundreds of topics had organized themselves into larger sections, the sections into chapters, and the chapters into parts; so that what the slips had organized themselves into finally was the contents of a book; but it was a book whose organization was from the bottom up rather than from the top down. He hadn’t started with a master idea and then selected … only those slips that would fit. In this case, … the organizing principle, had been democratically elected by the slips themselves. The JUNK and TOUGH slips didn’t participate in this election, and that created an underlying dissatisfaction. But he felt that you can’t expect a perfect system of organization of anything. He’d kept the JUNK pile as small as possible without deliberately suppressing it and that was the most anyone could ask.

A description of this system makes it all sound a lot easier than it actually was. Often he got into a situation where incoming TOUGH slips and JUNK slips would indicate his whole system of making topics was wrong. Some slips would fit in two or three categories and other slips would fit into no categories at all and he began to see that he would have to tear the whole system of organization apart and begin to reorganize it differently, because if he didn’t, the JUNK pile and the TOUGH pile and the CRIT pile would start howling at him louder and louder until he had to do it.

He began to think that if he just got away from people on this boat and had enough time it would come to him, but it hadn’t worked out as well as he’d hoped. You just get other kinds of interruptions. A storm comes up and you worry about the anchor …