malaise*lithium

I always abhorred finding things written in books. Marginalia, writing found in the margins of books, is collectively reviled in the west and perhaps because of our puritanical heritage everyone is admonished against creating it by some shrewish librarian at an early point in their lives. I followed that advice unthinkingly for a good while, but I knew for myself that I hated margin-defilers by the time I was fifteen.

I had bought a few books from a garage sale on a brisk spring morning; prized among the others and in truth the only one I remember clearly was a copy of Einstein’s collection of essays, Out of My Later Years. The book was littered with reader’s marks, little carrots and arrows and lines in the margins that kept the previous reader’s place, but also there were longer comments on Einstein’s thoughts. In the essay, “The Laws of Science and The Laws of Ethics,” was the note “to ask these questions is to answer them,” in “On Education,” next to Einstein’s caveat that the essay was based solely on his personal experience I found, “oh really?” Elsewhere was written, “are you sure?”

Are you sure? Was Albert Einstein sure? Well, I didn’t know then, though I suspected, as I do now, that he probably was sure, but his surety was irrelevant to the point he was making. “Are you sure?” is a mindless provocation. I seethed as only a fifteen-year-old can seethe at the person (I would then have used the term cretin) who had written these things. It seemed to me impossibly presumptuous and arrogant to write anything at all, and stupefyingly inane to have written the senseless things that I found.
For me, after that discovery marginalia was not only a transgression of etiquette but an admission of one’s idiocy. Having never seen anything erudite written in the margin of a book, I assumed that anything written there was necessarily asinine.

But as time has passed, and many pages too have passed before me, this sensibility has begun to erode. I still make no reader’s marks because I think they will trip me up when I go to read the book again, but I have found myself considering making notes on several occasions. I’ve used countless pads of post-it notes. I’ve slipped scraps of paper between the pages. I’ve kept an external reading journal. None of these are as effective, or, indeed, as satisfying as direct annotation.

To my mind, there are at least two types of marginalia: referential and conversational. The first type is a note made by the reader of the relationship between the text at hand and another work. Referential marginalia might point to another place in the same book, or to any outside source such a different book, a film, a magazine, a bit of common knowledge or even an event in the reader’s memory. These are usually made for the reader’s personal benefit on following readings or for the direct purposes of a specific task. To other readers, referential marginalia can be a valuable source of information that might be very hard to find by regular means. Sometimes following these links is worthwhile, but it is usually fruitless. At their best these notes are priceless, though this condition is rare, while in their worst and most common form, they are simply noise; a bit of graffiti on the page.

Unlike referential marginalia, which anticipates no response, conversational marginalia seek to engage the book in a discussion. The reader records a thought that is a communication with the text or with the author; this may be a summary, a question, or a critical comment, and in most cases this is just what the reader might say if, instead of reading, she were talking directly with the author. Conversational marginalia in the form of questions or summaries are a way for the reader to check her understanding, and serve some of the same purposes they would in a regular conversation. These notes are probably very helpful to the reader’s understanding during the initial read, but are likely irrelevant for even the same reader on subsequent readings. For later readers, these types of conversational marginalia are often annoying, they are useless but never as vexsome as critical marginalia can be.

The man who defaced the copy of Out of My Later Years that I bought wrote critical conversational marginalia. This is the kind of marginalia that originally aroused my ire, but when done well, this is also the kind I have come to respect above all others.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s marginalia has been considered insightful enough to warrant publishing on its own, and it has been–five volumes of it. I’ve read of an instance where an author read something written in the margin of his own book and revised subsequent editions because of it. The 17th century mathematician Pierre Fermat left a note in the margin of a copy of Diophantus’s Arithmetica [pictured at right] indicating that he had discovered a “marvelous demonstration” of a particular mathematical principle mentioned in the text, but wrote only that the margin was too narrow to contain it. The note was discovered years after Fermat’s death, and even today mathematicians cannot devise a “marvelous demonstration” of the proof he had in mind; their best efforts run many pages. That’s a bit of marginalia that has had a lasting impact, even if it has been a frustrating one. These cases and many others indicate that critical marginalia can have definite value, sometimes, as in the example of Fermat’s Last Theorem, eclipsing the value of the book it is written in. But the real reason that I appreciate critical marginalia is that it moves beyond the book, beyond the reader and the author, and places itself in the context of ideas. That context, the realm of ideas, is where books originate–books are, after all, just a means for ideas to do their work. So this form of marginalia that is primarily about ideas itself has the same intrinsic value that books do, and if its substance warrants, it can be as important as the book itself.

Of no small significance is the strangely voyeuristic aspect of marginalia. There is something about finding a note in the margin that ties you in a slight and mystical way with the maker of that mark. A bracket and a question mark–the last reader didn’t understand this; you feel satisfied that you can comprehend what your predecessor did not, or maybe you find proof in that mark that the text is indeed incoherent-the previous reader could make no more sense of it than you. Check marks, exclamation points, underlining, these are like finding evidence along a trail of those who went before, they are tiny confirmations that we are not alone.

To take this metaphor a step further, it is the responsibility of those who use these trails not to ruin them for those that follow. Most books will outlast their owners-I have no illusions about taking mine with me when Death arrives; I am told there is no room in that grim carriage. I can consequently anticipate that others will follow the same paths I followed through the books I have owned, and it is my responsibility not to spoil their trip with the clutter of my mind, but rather to leave them an accurate map, and maybe point out some pleasant stopping places along the way.

But it does take a lot to ruin a book. I’ve pulled Out of My Later Years down from the shelf, and, leafing through it as I’ve written this, found it to be entirely readable. In fairness, this path hasn’t been spoiled–littered on a bit, yes, but not ruined. I suspect this might be the only book I bought that spring morning more than a decade ago that I still own; the others have been consigned to the anonymity of the irretrievable past. And now, after having considered these things, the most valuable thing to me about this book has turned out to be the marginalia I first detested. And, if later I strike on something appropriate, I may just scribble it in there myself–I’m thinking of: “Oh, yeah? Prove it, Brainiac!”