optimistic.day

A calendar with one thought for each day, a short commentary beside it and a plate by Anna Atkins. The collection began with the Stoics. The opposite of a feed.

One thought for each day

I wanted a place where something appears once a day and nothing else happens. No notification, no further posts further down, nothing pressing you to read on. Once you have read today's entry, you are done.

The collection began with Stoic thoughts, because that outlook has been with me for a long time. By now Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius stand alongside writers, naturalists and philosophers of other persuasions. What interests me is their attempts to understand themselves: how they notice their own habits, come to doubt a conviction or change their mind.

Next year the same thoughts come round again, and you may well catch on a different one. That is why the 366 thoughts were distributed across the days at random, once, and the order has been fixed ever since. Future days are closed; anyone trying to skip ahead arrives at today's thought.

Why there is a text beside every quotation

A quotation on its own rarely stays with me for long. I wanted to put something next to it that lets me carry the thought further: an anecdote, a story, an observation, sometimes a question.

That is how the commentaries came about. They bring in people and events I would not have thought of alongside a given sentence. What someone did or lived through can give a thought a direction you would not reach by reading alone. Sometimes a story makes the sentence harder instead. Then it occupies me in a different way.

The quotations are marked as free renderings of public-domain texts, each with a reference. It matters to me that it stays clear what comes from the source and what I have added.

Anna Atkins

I came across Anna Atkins through one of these commentaries. Her name appeared in it, I looked at her pictures, and out of that came the idea of showing her plates on the site.

For me they too stand beside the thought. Seaweed on a beach is so familiar that we barely look. On her plates I suddenly see the fine branchings and how different the individual algae are. Something familiar shows another side when you look at it closely.

How these pictures came about fascinates me. Atkins brought her botanical knowledge and her experience as a draughtswoman together with a photographic process that had only just been invented. The plants themselves left their pale shapes on the blue paper. The result was the first photographically illustrated book, whose first instalment appeared in 1843; every plate in every copy had to be exposed individually.

The plates on the site are facsimiles from the Digital Collections of the New York Public Library. You can see the margins, the handwritten labels and the differences between the sheets. I show them that way because those traces are part of the pictures.

Perhaps that is where the optimism I associate with the site lies: that there is still something to discover in a familiar thought, or in seaweed on a beach.

The archive

Besides the daily ritual, I wanted the collection to be readable as a whole. In the archive it can be leafed through like a book, searched by keyword, and approached by mood: you choose how you happen to feel and get the thoughts that go with it.

That is the one deliberate exception to the ritual. The day stays the day, but anyone looking for something should be able to find it.

AI helps me write

I often have a sense of what interests me about a thought, but find it hard to put into words. With AI I can search for stories, try out phrasings and work on a text until I recognise in it what I meant to say.

I read the drafts, choose and change them. Sometimes it is a phrasing that does not fit which shows me what I actually mean. That too carries the thought further. On the site itself no AI is at work: what stands there is finished writing, held in the database.

The technical side

The site works without a framework, without dependencies and without a build step. That is a security decision: what is not there needs no maintenance and cannot drag anything in. The configuration lives outside the public directory, a strict Content Security Policy forbids embedded JavaScript and CSS, and the fonts are served from my own server rather than from a service.

The same files run under two addresses, each with its own configuration. The deployment transfers only explicitly listed runtime files.