I found this interesting article about things found in the margins of books copied tediously by monks. (I can’t think of anything worse than copying a text by hand and then making a mistake on the last line.) I can visualize the brothers, copying text onto papyrus by the sunlight through a window until dusk brings and end to the day’s labors. How painstakingly they must have toiled at their tasks! At least one of them agrees:
Writing is excessive drudgery. It crooks your back, it dims your sight, it twists your stomach.
And this leads to comments like these:
New parchment, bad ink; I say nothing more.
That’s a hard page and weary work to read it.
Let the reader’s voice honor the writer’s pen.
This page has not been written very slowly.
This parchment is hairy.
Thank God it will soon be dark.
Oh my hand.
Now I’ve written the whole thing: for Christ’s sake give me a drink.
As the harbor is welcome to the sailor, so is the last line to the scribe.
Some of the medieval monks were a little more, well, inappropriate with their illustrations. Venture here at your own risk. You have been warned.
Marginalia was practiced by Mark Twain and Nelson Mandela. What will become of marginalia in our high-tech world of bits and bytes and pixels? The pleasure of a well-bound book, with the wonders of the world and the spirit of man, are fast becoming the victims of tablets and “the cloud”. Well-written prose is being replaced by Twitter text and phone text abbreviations. Curling up with a good book is being replaced by lounging with a screen. And marginalia, those traces of thoughts left behind in books as they are pondered, will be harder to save.
I have an aversion for writing in books, but since I use my Bible as manual and don’t intend to get rid of it, I have no problem leaving marginalia in there. In my Bible I’ve made notes to remind myself of things I want to remember for later. What will those scribbled notes mean to my children after I’ve gone on? What will those bits of memory tell my grandchildren about me? Or am I doing a little too much naval gazing here?
And one last parting shot from a monk from many, many years ago:
Now I’ve written the whole thing: for Christ’s sake give me a drink.