About This Site
Noctis: The literal Latin translation is “of the night.”
Adversaria: A very old word. It once meant a book of miscellaneous notes, remarks, and extracts. A place where a person kept what they weren’t ready to throw away, but weren’t quite sure how to organize either. Not a diary. Not a scrapbook. Something looser than both. A collection of random things worth keeping.
Noctis Adversaria is my “little black commonplace book.”
What's Kept Here?
A few bits and bobs.
Black and white street photography. Strangers, mostly. People who agreed to be looked at for half a second, or didn’t notice at all. Faces that felt familiar for no reason I could name.
Vintage typewriters. The machines themselves, and what gets typed on them. Short lines, half-finished thoughts, the occasional poem that never made it anywhere further than the page.
Whatever else earns a place. An old building on its way to being a parking lot. A ticket stub. A four-leaf clover pressed flat before I could talk myself out of keeping it. Nothing here was expensive, and nothing here was really important except in the specific, private way that made me stop and keep it anyway.
Why?
Most of what happens in a day is ordinary, and most of the ordinary passes without anyone capturing it. This is a little bit of it. Nothing more than that.
If you’re the stranger in one of these photographs, get in touch. It’s yours if you want it.
In Good Company
The commonplace book is an old habit. Marcus Aurelius kept one, what we now call Meditations started as notes he wrote for no one but himself. Leonardo da Vinci filled his with sketches and stray observations on everything from anatomy to water.
John Locke was serious enough about the practice that he wrote an actual method for it. Thomas Jefferson kept several. So did Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf, and H.P. Lovecraft, each collecting lines and images they weren’t ready to let go of.
None of them were trying to build something. They were just saving what mattered enough to keep. This is the same thing, only with a camera and typewriter instead of a quill.