Underlinings

I can barely recognize parts of my past, experiences and entire eras that feel transplanted from someone else's life. On my brother's shelves I found The Japanese Cult of Tranquility, by Karlfried Graf von Druckman, first published in English in 1960. My paperback copy, the pages yellow and crisp with age, dates from 1974. On the inscription page I wrote my name and "8-2-75." I was then working in a bookstore here in Cleveland, and it was the start of one of the least tranquil periods in my life. I had an interest in Buddhism, especially Zen, and owned many volumes devoted to the subject, but now that seems impossibly alien.

The only underlining I made in the book is on page nine: "A man who has been tried by life is nearer tranquility than one who has not gone through the school of suffering."

Today, that sounds like romantic rubbish. In the act of highlighting that passage, I was expressing an exaggerated sense of self-importance. It is melodramatic and stinks of self-pity. Yet, 31 years later, a germ of that impulse -- to feel unacknowledged and misunderstood -- remains alive and healthy inside me, like a 2,000-year-old lotus seed waiting to germinate.

Behind me, on the shelves he built just last week, my brother has a book I enjoy very much -- A Stroll with William James, by Jacques Barzun. He, too, signed his name and the date -- "9/15/86" -- but his underlinings are more frequent, and more agreeable and prescient. This, noted before either of us had children, is on page 26:

"Except by chance, it seems, there is no way to bring up children right -- though some ways may be a little better than others."