Marginalia
When a dead reader's scrawl speaks louder than the printed page
I acquired the book, as one acquires a stranger's history, for the trifling sum of a coin and an idle afternoon.
Its spine had cracked in the manner of old confidences, and its pages carried the faint amber bruise that librarians call .
What the printed text declared, in its serene and self-satisfied type, need not detain us for very long.
For the true book, I soon understood, had been written not by the author but against him, in the margins.
A previous owner, nameless and dead and considerably more interesting than either of us, had annotated every page in a cramped hand.
Where the author wrote "and thus the matter is settled," the margin replied, in fading ink, "settled for whom?"
These glosses, at first, seemed the ordinary impertinences of an argumentative reader who could not keep his opinions to himself.
But the annotations began, page by page, to cohere into something that resembled a rival narrative, patient and .
The printed sentences supplied the alibi; the supplied the crime, and I could no longer tell which I was reading.
Consider, and here I must interrupt myself as this book has taught me to interrupt, the peculiar authority of a whisper.
A footnote defers to its master; a margin, by contrast, crouches beside the text and mutters, and unafraid.
The at the rear named a printer long since turned to dust, along with the year of the book's making.
Yet the annotator's ink, browner and later, had outlived that official record by a violence I could almost date.
On the of page ninety, the printed voice praised a certain minister for his prudence and his restraint.
In the margin, a single scrawled word, "liar," undid three hundred pages of careful, laminated reputation.
I found myself trusting the intruder, this dead vandal, more than the sanctioned author whose name adorned the spine.
Was this not, I asked the empty room, precisely the seduction that all are designed to perform?
The text is a monument; the margin is a ; and we, corrupt creatures, have always preferred the .
A , I remembered, is a manuscript scraped clean and written over, the earlier text bleeding faintly through the new.
This book was a of a stranger kind, where the later hand did not erase but besieged the first.
Somewhere around the middle chapters, the annotations stopped addressing the author and began, unmistakably, to address me.
"You have noticed," one observed, "that I am the only honest voice here; do not look away from me now."
I told myself that this was coincidence, the ordinary paranoia of a reader alone too long with an old book.
But the ink knew my objections before I raised them, and answered each one in the margin of the following page.
Which of us, then, was the annotator, and which the annotated, and which the merely printed and obedient text?
I began, with a pencil I do not remember sharpening, to write my own replies beneath the dead man's hand.
And the moment my graphite touched the paper, I understood that I had joined the argument and forfeited my innocence.
The next reader, whoever inherits this ruined and overwritten book, will not know which of the three voices to believe.
Perhaps that uncertainty, and not any sentence printed or scrawled, is the only thing the book was ever about.