Article by Phoenix writer Paulina Barnjak ’24:
Many students dread summer reading, especially when they have to annotate and highlight in the books.
But let me tell you a secret – I LOVE writing in the margins of books.
Some people may view this as a destruction of property or a waste of time. If they see an annotated book on the shelf or a hand me down book from a relative, they might choose a neater, nicer book to read. The annotations might get in the way of your perception of the book. But in my eyes, that’s good – a new perspective is great, sometimes even life changing.
Billy Collins writes about these annotations in his poem, “Marginalia.” I can picture myself as the people within the lines of this poem, especially in the following excerpt:
“One scrawls ‘Metaphor’ next to a stanza of Eliot’s.
Another notes the presence of ‘Irony’
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.
Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
hands cupped around their mouths.
‘Absolutely,’ they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
‘Yes.’ ‘Bull’s-eye.’ ‘My man!’
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.”
Collins’ stanza symbolizes the reality of being a high school student. Of course, we students note literary devices such as metaphors or irony. But then, the side of a truly avid reader (like myself) reveals itself when we come across a favorable scene or page. We write things down in the margins like “WHAT??”, “This is crazy!!”, or “You go, girl!” More than that, we are also relating to the characters, learning from them, and seeing ourselves within the pages when we annotate. Instead of seeing a piece of literature as a lame, boring, school assignment, we emotionally connect with the storyline and the characters that live in the pages.
Billy Collins tugged on the heartstrings of many romantic readers when he wrote the following lines:
“Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents’ living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page
a few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil–
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet–
‘Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.’”
How deep and relatable this paragraph is! This girl, like many readers, formed a deep connection with a part of this book. Collins, a mere teenager at the time, found inspiration in her little note. “But I’m in love” is what I would say about reading and how it takes us to far and unimaginable places, where we can only share how connected we are to the story with a word or two scribbled in the margin. The feeling doesn’t always have to be jovial either: sometimes we connect with the sorrow of a character or just get so frustrated by the betrayal of another.
The word margin, suggesting an edge, often refers to the periphery, the dismissed, i.e., the marginalized. But on the page of a printed text, that edge, that “empty” space is where we the readers engage in a discourse with the writer, or perhaps hopefully, with another reader who picks up a copy found at a second hand bookstore. The margin is not useless space, but a space for treasured thoughts and responses.
Writing down our thoughts connects us with a book. We’re not just reading, but we are within the pages themselves, living, feeling, and loving the story that is so often our own lives.
But what do I know?