I dag på Twitter kom det en klage på understrekinger i biblioteksbøker fra @syltegeek. Jeg er hjertens enig i at det er en uting, og tweetet tilbake at jeg en gang tilbragte en ettermiddag med å viske ut alle understrekinger i en biblioteksbok. Noen hadde brukt blyanten flittig. Jeg var student. Det virket som fornuftig bruk av tid; jeg bedret leseligheten til boka både for meg selv og for senere lånere. Men Syltegeek fikk også svar fra @mareinna, med det hun kalte et motargument, et argument jeg gjerne deler videre. Nå kan vi vel alle være enige i at marginalia er noe helt annet enn understreking, men dette er altså en ode til marginalia, så og si:
Marginalia – Billy Collins
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
why 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.»