Mark Me!

Sitting in my comfortable faux-Eames chair I began reading Jose Saramago’s novel The Gospel According to Jesus. He was not an unfamiliar author and I had previously read All the Names, Blindness, a and The Double, all interesting novels in both subject matter and style. Saramago remains a veritable stranger to paragraphs.  I was about two pages into The Gospel when I suddenly felt something amiss, as if I had forgotten something important that the reading required and even demanded; I actually felt like I was missing a limb!  I soon appreciated that what I lacked was a pen with which I could mark up the text as I read.
            I wonder when I began to insist on a pen-in-hand when I read. In my library there are few (if any) volumes without my markings and annotations. I suppose when I am dead whoever inherits my books will have also in their possession tracings of my consciousness over the years though exactly what year each book was read and first annotated would remain a secret. And I do wonder who would or could be really interested in my annotations or willing to decipher my scrawl. I am certain the annotative practice began when I was an English major at Roanoke College probably in 1965 or 1966. I wonder what I thought I was doing then. How did I know that I had even to mark up a text, underline and annotate it while I read. I know that in the expensive synoptic texts (well, they seemed expensive then though now I believe their cost might be considered exorbitant), I underlined with a pen and ruler making certain that the lines remained straight and the text unsullied. I suppose I underlined what spoke to my sensibility at the time or what I thought was significant but didn’t quite understand, or what I thought might appear somehow on the final exam. Sometimes they even were. When I pick up one of those college texts now, I am amused to see that sometimes I would underline an entire column—neatly, of course—thinking that something about these passages was significant or inscrutable. During class time the professor would then expound on the assigned reading and I might further annotate passages he had noted with the commentaries he spake unto us.  I was an avid reader and a devoted student.
            At some point those under linings and annotations became integral to my written papers and the pen in hand became like the shovel of the mine: the excavatory tool. I dug for gold and I often had to cut through a great deal of rock. I sometimes gathered only pyrite for my effort. And thus reading without a pen or pencil became uncomfortable. I was always looking for something in the reading of anything. I began to keep journals into which I would copy significant passages and my thoughts concerning them. These became seeds of papers I would write as I became a scholar and submitted papers to juried journals and book proposals to publishers. Some of them were even accepted.
            But I wonder what now is the purpose of my markings and annotations that demands I read with a pen in hand? I do not intend to write anymore scholarly for academic journals and I really don’t have motive or desire to learn to write for more popular periodicals. Once I aspired to be a public intellectual and thought to publish in a few of them, but I never arrived at that destination. Alas! Nevertheless, I have continued to read assiduously holding a writing implement in hand—I keep an assortment of pens for this purpose—and now mark-up not only every book I hold but sometimes even the literary and political journals I continue to read. And the books and journals pile up and I refill my pens with ink.
            I cannot remember what reading felt like sans pen, ink and a personal/scholarly journal close at hand. I hardly remember being so immersed in the text that I wouldn’t allow anything to disturb me, that there was no one who I would admit into my world as I read. Perhaps I felt that there might have been a sense of perfect calm, an complete immersion into the world of the book and a vanishing of the world outside of it and a sense of perfect calm even if over Wuthering Heights the storms raged. Whither has fled that visionary gleam? I soon learned that this state could be a perilous position: I thought of Ishmael’s warning regarding the watch on the masthead. He writes, “But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever.” I had trained as a literary critic and passed through various oceans and seas of technique. “Mark me,” says the ghost of Hamlet’s father, and over the years all these oceans and seas of techniques necessitated many markings. Perhaps the various pens kept me from dropping into the summer sea. At some early moment there would be no beach books. Reading was not ever an escape, and even what are called page-turners would be forever anchored by the markings.