Vol. IV — Autumn 2026A commonplace book, kept for youmacOS · Windows · Linux · iOS · Android · WebEst. 2023

An introduction

A notebook with a memory of its own.

For five centuries, careful readers kept commonplace books — quotations, half-thoughts, and things overheard, copied out by hand so they would not be lost. Most of them were lost anyway, in the plainest way: written down, and never found again. Mneme is the commonplace book that goes looking for you. It links what you write to what you’ve already written, answers questions from your own pages, and quietly returns an old thought on the morning you need it.

Begin your commonplace book

Free for one device, for as long as you keep writing. Read a specimen page ↓

§1

Specimen

Every page is read alongside every other.

Write the way you already do. As you go, Mneme reads the rest of your notebook and sets the relevant pages in the margin — the ones that cite this note, and the ones it suspects should.

Reading Notes toward a slower reading practice

⌘K Search · ⌘J Ask

Tuesday, 15 September 2026 · 7:42 am

Notes toward a slower reading practice

Finished Montaigne’s essay on idleness on the train. The untended mind, he says, “gives birth to so many chimeras and fantastic monsters” — which is a fair description of my notebooks before I started keeping a commonplace book¹ properly.

The trick, I think, is not reading more but returning more. Seneca says the same in the second letter: be a guest of a few authors, not a tourist of many.²

So: one essay a week, read twice. The second pass only in the margins, pencil not pen. Try it through October and see what survives³

#reading#habits#montaigne~/Mneme/Reading/slower-reading.md · saved locally

Fig. 1 — A daily page in Mneme, with its backlinks set in the margin.

§2

Contents

Six habits of a good memory.

Capture anywhere
From the menubar, your phone, a forwarded email, the web clipper, or a voice memo on a walk. Everything arrives in the same book, dated and in its place.
Voice memos are transcribed on-device.
It links itself
Mneme notices when two pages are talking about the same thing and offers to join them. Every note carries its backlinks, so no thought is an orphan for long.
You approve every suggested link. Nothing is rewritten.
Ask your notes
Put a question to your own writing in plain language. The answer comes back with footnotes to the exact pages it was drawn from — nothing invented, nothing from elsewhere.
See §3.
Resurfacing
Each morning, a short column of the past: what you wrote a year ago today, and the older pages that bear on whatever you’re writing now.
Five items a day, at most. Memory, not a feed.
Local-first, and private
Your notes are plain Markdown files on your own device. Sync is end-to-end encrypted; Mneme works entirely offline and never trains on your pages.
We can’t read your notebook. We checked.
The ordinary instruments
Daily notes that open to today. A graph view of how your ideas hold hands. Full-text search that returns before you’ve lifted your finger.
Search across 40,000 notes in under 30ms.

§3

Ask

Ask your notes. They answer with citations.

You asked

“What have I actually learned about reading slowly?”

Mneme, from 3 of your notes

You’ve come back to it three times. In January you copied Seneca’s line about being “a guest of a few authors”¹. A year earlier you’d noted that Locke re-read his entire commonplace book every Sunday². Last week you resolved to read one essay twice a week through October³ — though you haven’t yet written down how it’s going.

1Seneca — Letters 1–10, 11 January 2026.
2Commonplace books, a short history, 3 March 2025.
3Notes toward a slower reading practice, 15 September 2026.

§4

This morning

Old thoughts, returned on time.

Forgetting is not the enemy; it’s what makes remembering feel like a gift. Each morning Mneme sets aside a few pages you wrote and moved on from — chosen by date, and by what’s on your desk today.

One year ago today

22 September 2025

“Walked home the long way, past the canal. Decided to stop saying yes to Thursday meetings.”

— from Daily, 22 Sep 2025

Bears on what you’re writing

12 August 2023

“Calvino: a classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”

— related to Notes toward a slower reading practice

Where your notes live

~/Mneme/
├─ Daily/
│  ├─ 2025-09-22.md
│  └─ 2026-09-22.md
├─ Reading/
│  ├─ seneca-letters.md
│  └─ slower-reading.md
└─ Voice/
   └─ walk-canal.m4a.md

Plain files, in a folder you own. If Mneme vanished tomorrow, your notebook wouldn’t.

§5

Correspondence

Letters to the editor.

I have kept notebooks for twenty years and could never find anything in them. In my first week, Mneme handed me a note from 2019 that finished a chapter I’d been stuck on since spring.

Inês Carvalho

Historian, Coimbra

“The margin knows things I’d forgotten I knew. It is slightly uncanny and entirely useful.”

Tomás Reyes

Product designer

“Plain Markdown in a folder I control is why I switched. Asking my notes — and getting footnotes back — is why I stayed.”

Priya Natarajan

Staff engineer

Write it down. Mneme will remember.

Your first page takes a minute. The rest of your notebook will take a lifetime, and that’s rather the point.

Download Mneme — free

macOS
Windows
Linux
iOS
Android
Web

A notebook with a memory of its own.

Every page is read alongside every other.

Notes toward a slower reading practice

Six habits of a good memory.

Capture anywhere

It links itself

Ask your notes

Resurfacing

Local-first, and private

The ordinary instruments

Ask your notes. They answer with citations.

Old thoughts, returned on time.

Letters to the editor.

Rates of subscription.

Free

Pro

Teams

Write it down. Mneme will remember.