When I was ten-years-old, the worst thing in the world was a book with a cracked spine.
I detested dog-eared pages. Inky underlinings and margins stuffed with scrawlings made me recoil. Books were supposed to be kept pristine. It was a sign of love. Keep them clean, then stack them on a shelf with the rest of your treasured collection.
But, oh, how often and how deeply we hurt those we love. We’re unconscious of the harm we do, the evil we indulge, thinking all along that our actions profess our love.
I’ve injured Keats and wounded Shelley. Handicapped Homer, sullied Shakespeare, defiled Dante. My great loves maimed in the name of love – but trespassed against. Neglected, objectified, forgotten they stood, gathering dust for years. Until one day, I woke up. And, so often is the case, I was asleep so deeply, I needed someone to yank me out of my slumber.
My first year tutor at Oriel College. A man who translated Catullus into bawdy contemporary verse. His coloured notebooks leapt out at you from all the other books cocooned around you in his office. The red-spined notebook proclaimed: “Varney the Vampire”. The blue-spined notebook: “The Mysteries of Udolpho”. And “Dracula” on the spine of the black notebook.
James was a man so thoroughly curious about the Gothic that he kept dedicated notebooks for commentating, analysing, and picking apart penny dreadfuls. When he wasn’t doing that, he led discussions at the Raleigh Society: a roundtable of undergraduates who both brought works-in-progress to workshop and wrote right then and there on the spot, knowing the group would kindly probe and prod the work. James was the one who said, in the first week of my first year of my first Michaelmas term, something to the effect of:
Now is the time to abandon your notions of keeping a clean book. From here on out, you must make each book your own. Make it dirty. Write in it. Scribble, scrawl, tear out, if you need to. And get used to it.
It wasn’t as dramatic as Mr. Keating imploring his class to rip out Dr. J Evans Pritchard’s (PHD) preface to a book of poems in Dead Poets Society. But it might as well have been. Because every day that followed, my books became increasingly dirtier and dirtier.
My first copy of Wuthering Heights still bears the lingering marks of one not yet acquainted to marking their books. Is this okay? Would Emily Brontë forgive me for dirtying her book so? Are my comments even good enough, worthy enough, smart enough to justify defiling this wonderful work of art?
But as the years went on, I became more confident. You could tell the books I most loved, most detested, the ones that moved me the greatest, by the inkiness of their pages. Whether one’s scrawlings are “worthy” is the wrong question. Look to the long line of history’s greatest thinkers and you’ll see their libraries are filled with dog-eared marked-up books, and much of their annotations make little to no sense. That is not the point of marginalia.
Marginalia, by the way, is the art of marking your books. And make no mistake – marginalia is an art. But that doesn’t mean every scribble needs to be a lofty realisation worthy of it’s own novel or essay or lecture. The art is in the half-formed, barely conceived, snapshot flashes of inspiration, confusion, agitation, agreement, angst, outrage, perturbation, aspiration, revelation, and insight.
The art of marginalia is the art of conversation. Across time and space, you converse with the living and the dead – though the dead are now, through engagement, brought to life.
Homer lives. Shakespeare lives. Dante lives. You talk to these great thinkers. You ask them questions. You pit them against each other. You share things you’ve learnt elsewhere with them. You tell them about your life, the people you love, your hopes and dreams and fears. And they listen.