About this site

I got hooked on eleven about twenty years ago. There was no single moment and no sign in the sky, just a run of small things, one after another, until I had the feeling that this number had something to do with my life.

I had always liked prime numbers best. They seemed the cleanest and the most beautiful, and eleven fitted right in. Then I began finding articles about people who felt the same way, and in conversations it turned out that some friends had a curious affection for eleven too. That settled it: eleven is not like the others.

Looking back, it had been with me long before I paid attention. My date of birth, run through numerology, comes to 11. All through secondary school I was number 11 in the class register. Even Marian, the nickname I picked up along the way, comes to 11: give each letter its number the Pythagorean way (M=4, A=1, R=9, I=9, A=1, N=5), add them up to 29, and 2 + 9 = 11. (Numerology is filed under Beliefs on this site. But still.)

Here is the part I like most: it makes life simpler. When I cannot decide between two things, I take the one with an eleven in it and stop going back and forth. Two trains? The one that leaves at eleven past. When I was looking for a flat, I chose the one with number 11. Call it a quirk. It has saved me time, and it has not let me down yet.

Over the years eleven kept coming up in conversations, and I started collecting the facts and stories so I could pass them on. This site is where they ended up. Facts and beliefs are kept separate and labelled, so you can take as much or as little of the magic as you like. If you feel a little pull towards eleven yourself, I hope you find here that you are in good company. And if you do not feel it yet, give us eleven minutes.

How it is organised

The collection is the shelf. Every entry has a source you can follow. Facts are facts; things people believe are marked Beliefs; things people wrote in are Your stories.

The wall is simpler. One line per person: a name, a place, and something about you and eleven.

Your 11 story is how both of them grow. Everything is read by a person before it appears. There is no comment box and no algorithm, on purpose.

Credits

Photographs are from Wikimedia Commons under their respective licences and are credited on each entry. Quotations are short and linked to where they come from. If something here is yours and you would like it changed or removed, write in and say so.

The site is built with Eleventy, a static site generator that happens to be called eleventy. There was no other choice, really.

Contact

To write to me directly, with a correction, a question, or something of yours that you found here, email marian@elevenarium.com. Facts, stories and lines for the wall are easiest to send through the form.