By Rory Gilchrist
Do you keep the pages of your tomes pristine? Neither do I. Sure, occasionally, I’ll keep a nice, shiny white hardcover blemish-free for a while, but then I’ll think of something I know I’ll forget if I don’t scribble it down somewhere at hand. (Sticky notes and other little flags are a good compromise for things like this.) And the flyleaves1! They’re just crying out for quotations and questions, revelations and emendations. Whether you’re a pencilling-in purist or a marginalia maniac, you’ll enjoy this poem, by Poet Laurete Billy Colins:
Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.
Other comments are more offhand, dismissive–
“Nonsense.” “Please!” “HA!!”–
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote “Don’t be a ninny”
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls “Metaphor” next to a stanza of Eliot’s.
Another notes the presence of “Irony”
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
“Absolutely,” they shout to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
“Yes.” “Bull’s-eye.” “My man!”
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written “Man vs. Nature”
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page–
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake’s furious scribbling.Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents’ living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one pageA few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil–
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet–
“Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”
1. Flyleaf: ˈfly-leaf, n. A blank leaf at the beginning or end, but esp. at the beginning, of a book. (from the OED)
So good! Whenever I let someone borrow one of my program books, it feels like I’m lending away a diary. “Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love” captures it perfectly.
This makes me want to do a photo series of well-loved pages. It could be a bit like Postsecret but with books. Whadda ya think?
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