There is a used bookstore four or so blocks from where I live. It sells flotsam from the personal libraries of those in the neighborhood who have died or needed some space. I stop in the used bookstore when I can. It’s a place, growing rarer in a world of search queries and recommender systems, that has not arranged itself for me.
This random quality attracts me because I’ve found it is self-limiting to only seek what one knows to seek. Our preferences alone lead us down a narrow branchless path. And these days even the places that purport to offer us a plentiful menu of choices know us, or at least who we have been, better than we know ourselves. The menu is more so just another mirror than it is a point of departure.
On a recent visit to the used bookstore I picked up a book by Henry Miller wedged in the jumble. I was not looking for it and had not heard of it. It is called The Books In My Life. It is a wonderful account of his own reading - or is so far, as I’ve not finished. At its start, Miller considers what books do for our selves:
It was always my habit to mark excessively the books I liked. How wonderful it would be, thought I, to see those markings again, to know what were my opinions and reactions in that long ago. I thought of Arnold Bennett, of the excellent habit he had formed of inserting at the back of every book he read a few blank pages, whereon he might record his notes and impressions as he went along. One is always curious to know what one was like, how one behaved, how one reacted to thoughts and events, at various periods in the past. In the marginal annotations of books one can easily discover one’s former selves.
When one realizes the tremendous evolution of one’s being which occurs in a lifetime one is bound to ask: “Does life cease with bodily death? Have I not lived before?”…
This is so well put. One might go a step further than Miller. One might point out that the marginalia he finds in his old books are not just traces of his past self, but they are also his present self. Seneca wrote that we are today what we’ve learned in the past, like bees who collect nectar from many places then mingle them into something altogether new. As Nicholas Carr has explained, advances in brain imaging have substantiated Seneca’s intuition.
And Miller seems to agree. He writes of copying out long passages on slips of paper, losing them, then, years later, finding them again, finding passages that have “lived with me for years.” This too is the joy of marginalia. It’s like an old photo of yourself and a friend, one with whom you still keep in close touch, one without whom it is hard to imagine your self. Erasmus called these notes flowers. And indeed, The Books In My Life contains a charming appendix crediting the friends who’ve fed Miller books over the years.
That is well and good. What’s the purpose of writing about marginalia, as this newsletter claims to do? Miller has an answer for that too:
My weakness is to shout from the rooftop whenever I believe I have discovered something of vital importance. On finishing a wonderful book, for example, I almost always sit down and write letters to my friends, sometimes to the author, and occasionally to the publisher. The experience becomes a part of my daily conversation, enters into the very food an drink I consume…Without the enthusiastic reader, who is really the author’s counterpart and very often his most secret rival, a book would die. The man who spreads the good word augments not only the life of the book in question but the act of creation itself.”
Well, I don’t know about any acts of creation, bees and flowers aside. But it’s good to be any of service to the life of The Books In My Life. So here’s a letter to that end.
I share your appreciation of used bookstores. Growing up near Boston, one of the great delights was a day trip via the T to the city, Cambridge, and Somerville. We had favorite used bookstores, all of them crammed with a wonderous variety through which we would browse and then share our discoveries. Decades later, this habit of pulling off the shelf books with an intriguing title, in this case Burning the Days, introduced me to James Salter (West Point Class of 1945). His obsessions were not mine, but his prose, fiction and non-fiction, is such a delight that I began tracking down the rest of his work.
As a historian, another reason to rage against the so-called information age is that no one writes marginalia on their digital documents. In the rivers of paper that once flowed through the Big Green Machine are notes from both the great and the unknown expressing, among other things, wry humor, righteous indignation, and resigned cynicism. My favorite example is from early 1968, as HQDA and OSD fought over what to do with all the college boys who would soon be drafted after grad school deferments ended. OSD did not want to “waste” this “high-quality manpower” in the combat arms. The Army wanted most of these men in the combat arms, both as a matter of social equity and to reinforce its badly frayed junior leadership ranks. The Army member of the OSD working group on this issue sent regular reports to the Army’s chief of staff. Several times during the Tet Offensive, the secretary of the general staff wrote “SOMEONE HAS TO FIGHT” on the report’s routing slip. The chief of staff, twice awarded the Combat Infantryman Badge, on one occasion responded with “Yea Man!” On another, with “The smartest people available should be squad leaders-to help men survive,” probably in response to his own combat memories and the ever-increasing casualty statistics arriving at his desk. Marginalia like this are for me little flowers that connect us with the past in a way the documents they annotate cannot, serendipity much like discovering an unexpected treasure in a used bookstore.