Transcript

I’m Major Jackson, and this is The Slowdown.

After four years of a commuter marriage, my wife and I decided it was time to live under one roof — no more semiweekly flights or separate household expenses. We amicably settled on matters like which sofas to keep and whose Netflix account to close. And then, a full-blown argument arose over . . . books. What to do with our books?

She wanted to combine our libraries. Oh, no, no, no! I wanted separate shelves in respective offices. My reason? She desecrates books! She demolishes them. She underlines. She circles. She slashes. Her marginalia looks like a mind in gladiatorial combat. When I stumble upon her reading in our home, I silently cringe, then back out of the room, alarmed at her pen raised like a weapon. First editions, rare editions, she has no guilt, no remorse.

I, on the other hand, keep books behind glass display cases and protectively wrapped dust jackets, tied with cotton twill ribbons. One year, I searched online for the proper gloves to use when handling books. Turns out dry, clean hands are best.

I believe books are sacred, thanks to my family’s strong emphasis on literacy as a means of social ascension. And back in high school, a handed-down textbook, say, Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet or Shelly’s Frankenstein, usually contained a decade’s worth of teenage jokes and scribblings. I cherished new copies of textbooks. I took notes in black composition notebooks, not on those pristine pages. Used bookstores are a challenge for me.

I am a quiet, pensive reader. Didi is a physical reader, and tells me that marking a book is a way of remembering, a way to be in dialogue, a way of doing more than passively absorbing ideas, but a way of owning them.

Today’s elegant poem reads like a manifesto for those who rigorously annotate. For those who know that marking a book renders visible silent conversations.

Illumination
by Natasha Trethewey

Always   there is something more to know
      what lingers      at the edge of thought
awaiting illumination       as in
      this secondhand book       full
of annotations     daring the margins in pencil
a light stroke as if
      the writer of these small replies
meant not to leave them    forever
      meant to erase
evidence of this private interaction
      Here     a passage underlined   there
a single star on the page
      as in a night sky       cloud-swept and hazy
where only the brightest appears
      a tiny spark     I follow
its coded message    try to read in it
the direction of the solitary mind
      that thought to pencil in
a jagged arrow   It 
      is a bolt of lightning
where it strikes
      I read the line over and over
as if I might discern
      the little fires set
the flames of an idea    licking the page
how knowledge burns      Beyond
       the exclamation point
its thin agreement     angle of surprise
there are questions   the word why
So much is left
      untold     Between
the printed words     and the self-conscious scrawl
      between   what is said and not
white space framing the story
      the way the past      unwritten
eludes us   So much
      is implication      the afterimage
of measured syntax     always there
      ghosting the margins that words
their black-lined authority
      do not cross     Even
as they rise up   to meet us
      the white page hovers beneath
silent    incendiary     waiting

"Illumination" by Natasha Trethewey from MONUMENT © 2018 Natasha Trethewey. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.