After circling it for a while, rather like a ship around a whirlpool, I've fallen down the rabbit hole of Obsidian plugin.

Although making any contributions to a closed-source project is kind of distateful to me on principle, I admit that after a bit of perusing the API's seem pretty robust.

My goal is to create a plugin which can help track the creation of paragraphs-- actually groups of paragraphs. Turns out there's not a good word for a "group of paragraphs", other than "section" which is so agonizingly generic. So I made up a word, a "themagraph". It's a group of paragraphs which share a common theme or subject.

The extension will track when a themagraph is started and when it is created, as well as when it is last edited. They'll also be able to store arbitrary metadata about that themagraph.

Why do this? I've found that it's vastly easier to dump all my thoughts into one file and sort out which paragraph (or group of paragraphs) pertained to what topic later on. This " themagraph" is the ideal unit for me to associate with a given subject.

There is a part of Franz Kafka's "The Castle" where a father waits every day outside the Castle, beside the path where the Castle officials ride their sleighs out into the town, in the hopes that he will get an opportunity to speak with one of them. He does this because his family is being shunned after one of his daughters rejected an invitation from one of the Castle's officials. This shunning was not an order from the Castle itself; their community simply heard what had happened and assumed that a terrible consequence would befall the family, and shunned them preemptively. The father believes that if he can just speak to an official one time, he can get the whole matter straightened out and restore his family's place. He spends his entire life waiting by the sleigh trail and eventually dies, never accomplishing this.

The main character, K, who is an outsider from the community, and is frequently directly thwarted by the people of the town in his attempts to reach and speak to an official named Klamm, ends up interacting with and speaking to a variety of Castle officials. He even takes a nap with one.

It's really quite tragic. K accomplishes effortlessly something that the father fails to achieve even after devoting his entire life. Sometimes life is like that too.