20190308.0430

I noted yesterday a concern that I will be diminished by excising from my collection a number of the printed pages for which I once had use but no longer do, and which are marked by my marginalia from the time now gone when I might have used such things. They relate, as I think on it, to earlier remarks of mine. Some time ago, before leaving The City, I made comments in this webspace about the nature of home, comments spurred by the imminence of leaving a home to try to make another elsewhere. (It did not work.) In them, I noted the idea of home as being a place where the internal is made at least partly external; that is, for me, a home is a place where I can allow my interiority to emerge into and be represented by the externalities of decor and paraphernalia. Marginalia is such an emergence, albeit one of more restricted scope--but that it is smaller does not mean it is less a part of me, the loss of which seems a painful thing.
Thinking on it leads me to other thoughts, though. A number of the books I have were owned by others before me. (The physical objects are what I refer to, here; my copy of, oh, Assassin's Apprentice is not the same thing as the novel itself. The latter exists whether I read it or not, whether I buy a copy or not, and it belongs to others; the former is my enduring access to it, an expression of my agency upon the text--but, again, the text exists whether I read it or not.) They have the marginalia others have left. When I look at them, they offer me some small insights into the minds and beings of those others. I get small glimpses of their stories, of their characters, and I find myself intrigued by them.
Sometimes, those marginalia are the work of elder members of my family, people I barely knew--if I knew them at all; the grandfather whose copy of Shakespeare I own died when I was 22, to be sure, but I did not see him much or often when I was growing up, and how well a child can know an adult, particularly one who gave every evidence of believing in the separation of those two states and in keeping things private, is an open question. (I make a clear distinction between childhood and adulthood, certainly, and there are things I do not discuss, but the boundaries are far more porous for me than they seem to have been for others in my family. Clearly, else I'd not keep several blogs across several years.) But in reading his margin notes, I get a sense of how he regarded texts with which I am familiar. I get a sense of who he was in earlier times, when he perhaps could be more himself and not so much himself-as-father or himself-as-grandfather.
Sometimes, those marginalia are the work of people altogether removed form me--save from the commonality of owning a particular copy of a text. I do not have the vested interest in knowing about them the things I learn about my family from reading their marginalia, to be sure, but I still learn of them, still gain some insight into who they were that they made the notes that they made about the things that they read--and I learn about myself from my consideration of those margin notes. And while this is hardly a revelation--there are scholars who make their whole careers looking at such things, though they tend to focus on the marginalia of the mighty, and I have not the holograph copies of such writers' works--the details of less famous lives are not less important for being less known.
I continue to be torn about the matter of my own side-scrawled pages therefore. I am vainglorious enough to want to be known and wondered about as those whose hands have marked pages I now own are. But I also think I want Ms. 8 to know me as me and not just me-as-father. (Or at least to know another performance of mine, if me-as-scholar is not me-as-me, which would be a legitimate argument to make.) So I am still uncertain as to whether I ought to release my things out into the world or continue to hoard them. I do not yet know which will be the greater good or the lesser ill.