I recently came across a concept which I think sums up this website in a nutshell. I’ve often struggled to explain what this ain’t livin’ is, since it sort of defies categorization. It’s a soapbox. It’s a personal journal. It’s a sandbox. It’s a collection of reviews. It’s recipes. It’s adventures. Most of the people I know who maintain websites have sites that fit into neat categories, like collections of poetry, or writing about food, and sometimes I envy them for their clear, even messages, their loyal readers, their sense of purpose and focus.

I crave order and neatness, and am sometimes horrified by the sprawling disorder which is this website. Every now and then I attempt to codify it, to contain it, to control it, and within seconds, it seems, it’s oozing out the edges again.

And then I read about the silva rerum.

For those of you not up on your Polish history, a silva rerum is a sort of family chronicle, a massive diary kept to keep track of family history. But it’s a little more complicated than that. A silva rerum or sylwa has quotes, poetry, keepsakes, copies of important documents, notes about finances. “Chronicle” really is the right word to use, because a silva rerum is like a repository of all of the information which a family thinks is interesting, important, or amusing.

These journals were kept largely by the Polish nobility, and thanks to some very dedicated record keepers, we can get a fascinating slice of life out of various medieval chronicles. We don’t just know how much a peck of grain sold for and how many serfs these people had, we know what their friends thought about them, what the priest said on Sundays, the order they planted their crops in, what their coats of arms looked like.

Many span across multiple generations, including entries from not just the family members, but honored guests and friends. In a silva rerum, you can see shifting fortunes and the changing face of Polish society, and I think that’s pretty amazing. The thought of keeping a multigenerational chronicle, though largely for internal use within the family, is pretty daunting.

Silva rerum is, of course, Latin for “forest of things,” and that, I realize, is what this site is. It’s a forest of things which can be viewed alone, or as a whole. While most entries stand on their own, they also form a collective narrative about the person who writes them, even if I don’t write much about my personal life anymore.

It pleases me immensely to finally have a phrase to describe what this site is.

“What is it, exactly,” someone will ask me, and I will say “a silva rerum,” and that will be the jumping off point for a conversation about Latin, and history, and journals. I doubt this site will endure for hundreds of years to be examined by future generations, but I do like the thought that, in a way, it is me. Myself, and my forest of things.