“Mystifications” is a bi-weekly column by Diego Del Aguila. Lingering on often overlooked questions hidden in everyday life, it seeks to re-mystify what has become naturalized.
1. Upon borrowing a book from the library, it is never a surprise to find the marks, underlinings, and annotations from a reader of a distant past. Sometimes, they are tender and helpful, yet they can also be distracting and unpleasant. Thus, the experience of reading can often significantly depend on what someone else once considered worthy of noting. If you are lucky—if your niche interests allow you to be the first, or even the thousandth borrower in a tradition of respectful borrowers—you can find a book unmarked. Only then can you experience the reading without the presence of a ghost.
2. It is possible to argue that the desire to underline something in a book derives from a distrust of ourselves. We do not fully trust our memories to remember the fragments, sentences, or words we once considered absolutely crucial, so we highlight to establish and immortalize its relevance—so that it can capture our attention in future engagements with the text. We need to leave a trace for our future selves to remember, so they can see again what we once saw.
3. Yet every interaction with a text inevitably changes it. What once seemed important can become irrelevant in subsequent encounters. The experience of reading changes along with the gaze that makes it possible, and the traces left on a page can expire when they no longer represent our subjectivity. In the end, the marks can become, like any piece of writing, bare ruins of what we once thought.
4. When you borrow a book already marked with underlines and notes, you are engaging not only with the text but with someone else’s imprint. The marks point to what “might” be important. It is reading on someone else’s shoulders, or being taken by the hand—though by a stranger. Even when the book comes from a friend, you can never know what led the previous reader to stop where they did—to leave a mark where they did. And yet, these marks still influence your experience of the text beyond comprehension.
5. The pain of highlighting a newly purchased book derives not only from the thought of spoiling pure and clean pages, but also, and perhaps more importantly, from the way an underline forces a hierarchy of reading where previously none existed. The text is no longer open, undiscovered, with the possibility of pointing in all directions. Now, it carries bruises that guide the reading forward.
6. However, there might be a necessity to the underlining and the highlighting of the text—it makes critical reading possible. Reading is not always done for the sake of pleasure; sometimes it must be done with inquisitive intentions: to extract, to reorganize, to transfigure the text for the sake of learning. The enlightening enterprise of literary analysis would not exist without the act of underlining, marking, and changing the composition of a page. Without marks, the immensity of a text—its open-endedness—would offer no ground for the minute and granular analysis that academic activity requires.
7. We are confronted with a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the marking of a page can perhaps be understood as an act of violence. On the other hand, however, with the prospect of criticism and of the transfiguration of thought, underlining may well be an act of care. It means creating a traceable relationship with what is read.
8. These problems of underlining also provide insight into writing. Once a text is published and distributed, it no longer belongs to the writer. Every page can be marked freely and according to distinct subjectivities, according to the violence or care of the unknown reader. No one, not even the author, can claim to know the “proper” way of underlining their text.
9. From a young age, we learned techniques and methods to highlight information, to emphasize what’s important and rule out what’s not. In the end, however, each person possesses radical freedom to decide how to underline a text, to decide how to relate to a text as they move through time. The encounter with a text, in that sense, is always private. One could decide to never leave a mark on a page—no one is watching. However, if the book is borrowed from the library and must be returned, or if it is donated, or inherited, any future reader is entitled to complain or rejoice at the disturbance of a ghost.
10. Leaving a trace on a page can be seen (and perhaps to much benefit) as a fundamentally ethical question. The value of the trace, of course, depends on who inherits it. To a stranger, it might mean the violent imposition on the page of an alien logic. To a loved one, however, the marks on a page might be what, once we are gone, brings us back into this world.
11. The marks we leave on a book will probably outlast us, well beyond when our gaze and thought have finally ceased to exist.
12. Every time we leave a mark on a piece of text, we are transforming ourselves into ghosts. Like Barthes felt when subjected to a photograph—we are getting one step closer to death, to “truly becoming a specter.”
13. No text will be read forever. At some point, the marks on a page will be glanced at for the last time. So many of your own recent markings will never be seen again. Even ghosts must at some point cease to exist.
14. Digital technologies have shifted the landscape of underlining forever. Any text can be reproduced infinitely, which means no act of underlining is as definite or violent as it is on the physical page. One can simply copy and paste the desired text, or re-download it clean, without marks, in a matter of seconds; or erase any underlining without there ever being a hint of their existence.
15. In the physical page, erasing pencil marks leads to the physical deterioration of the page. It is in such a case that erasing can also be considered a violent act, especially when compared to the smoothness and invisibility of digital “deletion.”
16.. The proliferation of digital technologies and the gradual vanishing of physical underlinings means we are entering, slowly, into a ghostless world.
