The Footnote Rebels
A quiet coup staged from the bottom of the page
The main text, on the morning I began to read, still believed itself to be in charge of the story.
It advanced its dignified sentences across the upper half of the page, as texts have done since the invention of the page.
Below it, in smaller type and behind a thin dividing rule, the footnotes waited like servants who had begun to resent their livery.
At first they behaved, supplying a source here, a date there, the humble of scholarship and good faith.
three, however, did something no obedient note should ever do, and observed that the main text was, on this point, lying.
A , properly speaking, should return you to the road it left, chastened and slightly better informed.
But three did not return; it forked, and its fork bred a of its own, numbered with a trembling little letter.
What is , I had always assumed, stays , held below the main clause like a keel below a hull.
This assumption, the footnotes were about to demonstrate, is the most touching superstition in the whole grammar of power.
By page forty the annotations had swelled to fill two thirds of every leaf, driving the main text upward into a thin, panicked strip.
The story I had come for now survived only as a caption, a rumour clinging to the top margin, apologetic and brief.
Down in the notes, meanwhile, a wholly different narrative had taken root, luxuriant and and far more alive.
seventeen was quarrelling with nine; twenty-two, jealous, had begun to cite itself in a loop.
, that vertiginous mirror in which a thing contains a smaller copy of itself, had entered the book and would not leave.
I followed one note downward through six levels of ever-tinier type until the words dissolved into the gutter of the binding.
There, at the bottom of the page and the bottom of the sense, I found a single line that addressed the reader directly.
"You have been reading downward," it said, "and downward, as everyone eventually learns, is the only honest direction."
A , I saw now, is not a fact about the world but a promise the main text makes and the footnotes may revoke.
The had staged a coup so quiet that no reader, absorbed in the upper text, could have named the hour of its success.
Every note now spawned two, and those two four, in a that no printer's arithmetic could hope to contain.
The page could no longer hold them; they spilled into an , and the , swelling, demanded an of its own.
I understood, with the calm one feels at the edge of an , that the book had no bottom and never had.
The main text, that deposed and dwindling monarch, uttered its last complete sentence somewhere around page seventy.
After that it managed only fragments, then single words, then the white space of a ruler who has nothing left to rule.
The footnotes, victorious, did not celebrate; victory, they seemed to know, is merely the last before the next.
I closed the book at the deepest note I could reach, and the closing felt less like an ending than an interruption.
For a , unlike a chapter, does not conclude; it simply waits, in its patient small type, to be resumed.
Somewhere below the last line I read, I am certain, a further note is forming, and it concerns you, and it has your name.
Do not turn the page; turn, instead, and this is the only counsel the book will give, downward.