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Mar. 31st, 2004 09:02 amThis was posted in briefer form in a comments thread, but I thought it was oddly important enough that I wanted to repost it on the journal proper. With regards to discussion of treatment of books, yes, I agree with Remus in the cookie -- I dogear, underline, scrawl notes in margins (often refuting large portions of text with a single pithy phrase!) and, when writing essays, cover in post-it flags which don't always get removed.
Don't get me wrong; I have all due reverence for books, and only do this to my own personal copies, and then usually not to pleasure reading -- I suspect I'll soon begin underlining The Seven Storey Mountain which is my current reading, but I usually only dogear Pratchett or Stout. Books are for reading, enjoying, and learning from; much like plays, they are pauses in time while the world moves around them, but that needn't make them static, and indeed they can't be, because our attitudes towards them change.
I underline books for the same reason I almost always object to realistic, period interpretations of Shakespeare.
I treat these markings as a way for me to become part of the dialogue of the book -- when I mark a passage or write a note in the margin, I'm changing the text, for myself and anyone who reads that particular volume after me. Rather like a director who highlights certain elements of a play which are more (or in some cases less) relevant now than once they were.
For example, I have a book of 20th Century American Poetry, which I've had since I was a high school freshman and which is one of my most treasured volumes. Not because I like all of the poetry in it -- there are some I don't and suspect I never will -- but because over the years I've marked and dogeared it until it has become irretrievably my own.
Eight years of my thoughts and feelings are kept in that book -- I stopped marking it when I graduated college -- so that I can open it, and come across an underlined passage, like this one from Dickinson:
As all of Heaven were a bell
And Being but an ear
And I am silence, some strange race
Wrecked, solitary, here.
When I read that, I remember being fifteen, and the deep, abysmal loneliness I was feeling when that poem spoke to me. It connects me to my past; it's like a journal of who I am, though at the same time easily shareable, because although others may read it, no one understands the significance of those marks but me.
Ancient winemakers had all the respect in the world for their wine, but built ridiculous taper-based, wide-mouthed jars to store it in, so that when they were taken a-shipboard they could be properly stowed with minimal chance of breakage. The text I respect, even if I don't always agree with it; its physical manifestation is merely a vessel for its message. As such, it must be treated as any wine-jar might be: adapted to the person which carries it.
Don't get me wrong; I have all due reverence for books, and only do this to my own personal copies, and then usually not to pleasure reading -- I suspect I'll soon begin underlining The Seven Storey Mountain which is my current reading, but I usually only dogear Pratchett or Stout. Books are for reading, enjoying, and learning from; much like plays, they are pauses in time while the world moves around them, but that needn't make them static, and indeed they can't be, because our attitudes towards them change.
I underline books for the same reason I almost always object to realistic, period interpretations of Shakespeare.
I treat these markings as a way for me to become part of the dialogue of the book -- when I mark a passage or write a note in the margin, I'm changing the text, for myself and anyone who reads that particular volume after me. Rather like a director who highlights certain elements of a play which are more (or in some cases less) relevant now than once they were.
For example, I have a book of 20th Century American Poetry, which I've had since I was a high school freshman and which is one of my most treasured volumes. Not because I like all of the poetry in it -- there are some I don't and suspect I never will -- but because over the years I've marked and dogeared it until it has become irretrievably my own.
Eight years of my thoughts and feelings are kept in that book -- I stopped marking it when I graduated college -- so that I can open it, and come across an underlined passage, like this one from Dickinson:
As all of Heaven were a bell
And Being but an ear
And I am silence, some strange race
Wrecked, solitary, here.
When I read that, I remember being fifteen, and the deep, abysmal loneliness I was feeling when that poem spoke to me. It connects me to my past; it's like a journal of who I am, though at the same time easily shareable, because although others may read it, no one understands the significance of those marks but me.
Ancient winemakers had all the respect in the world for their wine, but built ridiculous taper-based, wide-mouthed jars to store it in, so that when they were taken a-shipboard they could be properly stowed with minimal chance of breakage. The text I respect, even if I don't always agree with it; its physical manifestation is merely a vessel for its message. As such, it must be treated as any wine-jar might be: adapted to the person which carries it.
