My grandmother kept her opinions in the margins. She did not trust diaries — she said diaries were for women who hoped to be read. She trusted, instead, the white outer rim of a borrowed book, the soft territory beside a printed paragraph, where her pencil could murmur back to whichever long-dead author had presumed to instruct her. By the time she died, in the autumn of 1998, her library was a small parliament of disagreements, alphabetized by Dewey and held together by the gentle slovenliness of a long marriage to print.
I inherited the books in cardboard boxes that smelled of cedar and of the particular dust of a New England attic in October. There were one hundred and eighty-seven volumes. I counted them twice, because counting was the only thing I could think to do that night, and because numbers, unlike sentences, do not require you to feel anything immediately.
She trusted, instead, the white outer rim of a borrowed book, the soft territory beside a printed paragraph, where her pencil could murmur back.
The marginalia, when I finally allowed myself to read them, were a revelation in the strict theological sense of that word: a thing previously veiled, suddenly let through. Adelaide Vesper, who in person had been famously discreet — who had taught second grade for thirty-one years and had been described in her obituary, with a kind of bureaucratic affection, as “steady” — was, in private conversation with her books, a wit, a heretic, an occasional vulgarian, and a tender, unembarrassed advocate for the small and the slow.
Beside a sentence in Henry James she had written, in 1962: Yes, but what is he so afraid of? Say it, Henry. Beside a passage in Simone Weil, in 1971: This is true and it is unbearable and I will not put the book down. Beside a paragraph in a forgotten 1950s parenting manual that had instructed mothers to maintain “a posture of dignified composure at all times”: Hahaha. No.
What I want to say, and what is harder to say than I expected, is that my grandmother was teaching me, across thirty years and from inside a cardboard box, how to read. Not how to scan, not how to extract, not how to acquire information from a page as though the page were a vending machine — but how to answer a book. How to speak back to it. How to refuse to be the silent partner in the conversation.
The contemporary reader, I think, has forgotten this. We have been taught that the book is a closed system, a finished product, a thing to be received. Adelaide knew otherwise. The book, for her, was the opening half of a sentence. The other half was waiting in her pencil.
I have begun, this past year, to write in my own books. It feels, at first, like vandalism. Then it feels like prayer. Then it feels like nothing in particular — like brushing one's teeth, or salting the soup — a small ordinary act of presence in the margins of a life that is otherwise, like all lives, mostly text one did not write.