Every taxonomy is an argument disguised as a fact. To place one thing beside another on a shelf is to assert a relationship between them, and to assert that this relationship matters more than the hundred other relationships each object maintains in secret. The catalogue does not describe the collection. It replaces it with a more obedient version of itself.

I have been thinking about this for longer than is probably reasonable.

The trouble begins with the first division. The moment you separate the world into two categories, you have created three things: the two categories, and the border between them, which belongs to neither and which will, if you are honest, eventually require its own classification. This is how a system of two becomes a system of three, then seven, then a number that no longer fits comfortably in any system at all.

There is a famous library, possibly apocryphal, whose catalogue was said to be larger than the collection it described. Each entry required annotations, each annotation cross-references, each cross-reference its own entry. The catalogue became a literature unto itself, a parallel collection that mirrored the original but exceeded it in every dimension. The librarians, it is said, stopped consulting the shelves entirely. They found everything they needed in the descriptions of things they no longer visited. I think about those librarians often. I think they understood something essential about the relationship between the map and the territory, which is that the map, given enough time and attention, becomes the more interesting country.

Consider the problem of the miscellaneous drawer. Every household has one. It is the place where objects go when they resist the categories offered by the other drawers. Batteries beside rubber bands beside a key that fits no lock anyone remembers. The miscellaneous drawer is not a failure of organization. It is organization’s confession: an admission that the system is incomplete and has always known it.

I attempted once to catalogue my own uncertainties. I wanted a clean inventory, a ledger of everything I did not know, arranged by subject and severity. The project collapsed almost immediately, not because the list was too long but because each uncertainty, once written down, split into smaller uncertainties, each of which demanded its own entry. The catalogue of what I did not know grew faster than my ability to not know things. I was producing ignorance at an unprecedented rate, simply by trying to organize it.

This is the central paradox, and I do not believe it is resolvable: the act of cataloguing creates new objects that require cataloguing. The system generates its own excess. Every shelf you build to hold the overflow becomes, in time, a surface that accumulates its own disorder.

What I am left with is not a system but an orientation. A willingness to begin the sorting, knowing it will not end. There is something in this posture that feels more honest than completion, more faithful to the actual texture of things. The uncatalogued is not what we have failed to reach. It is what keeps the project alive, the remainder that ensures there is always one more entry to make, one more drawer to open, one more category to invent for the things that will not stay where we put them.

I file these notes under “pending.”