We often find the pages of our books decorated in annotations; a kind of trail we leave behind in the literature we interact with. But why do we feel the need to imprint a piece of ourselves onto the physical media we engage with?
The answer could instinctively be a simple one: to recover and recall our thoughts and musings on a particular line, or a word, that evokes some feeling of importance. Something that we understand to have significance for whatever reason that might be. Writing down our thoughts in the margins of a book might just be a matter of practicality; a note to self to come back to when the time feels right.
While true, such a response seems reductive — surely there must be more to these annotations than leaving a reminder on the page? To break it down further, we have to examine what exactly these handwritten scribbles entail. To materialise our thoughts and feelings onto a piece of literature is to form a relationship with it. Each note that we leave next to the written text is a product of our own entanglement with the words that we read, and the thoughts and feelings that they produce within us.
Perhaps then we shouldn’t talk about our annotations as if they aim to impose something onto our books, but rather as they seek to collaborate with them. At its core, this highlights what we might think to be one of the essential functions of literature: to take something and make something new. To form our own interpretations, as we’re so often prompted to in the study of literature.
Because the brilliance of literature lies not in its relaying of information, but in what it creates within each of us. To read a book is to experience it, and that experience is a crucially different one for each reader. The uniqueness in this act is exactly what fuels the desire to read, as it sparks personal affinities with the language, characters, and worlds constructed. As we put our own pens to the page, we cement these experiences for ourselves.
To annotate, therefore, goes beyond taking notes, or imprinting onto a book. Instead, it represents the art of entangling a piece of ourselves with the literature we consume; weaving together both writer and reader as we each create our own versions of the books we so fondly annotate.
Image via Hal Purton @halpurton for The Student
