'To Illustrate With Marginal Notes'

I no longer write in books, a decision made decades ago that I occasionally regret. It came to feel like defacement. But it’s interesting to see what attracted, delighted or puzzled my younger self. Here are the three books on my shelves most heavily underlined and glossed: 

Ulysses, the Random House edition I bought in 1967 and read for the first time that year. With each subsequent reading, I added so many notes I had to tape notepaper among the pages for annotations. The margins were full. On the title page I find such invaluable information as the etymology of Odysseus, the definition of parallax (with diagram), an explanation of the punningly named Ormond Hotel in “Sirens,” and this sentence fragment: “the madnesses [sic] of Deasy, Lyons, Breen, Farrell.” I probably wrote this in 1972, and I don’t remember writing it.

 

Pascal’s Pensées, the Penguin paperback from 1961, translated by J.M. Cohen. I already had a taste for aphoristic prose, which is reflected in the passages underlined. I must have been reading the existentialists at the time. A disturbing number of references to Sartre.

 

Dr. Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, another Penguin. Mostly underlinings rather than notes. I seem to have been especially impressed by Imlac.

 

All three volumes are officially unreadable. Ulysses has a broken spine and binding. Pascal and Johnson are in two pieces held together with rubber bands. My attachment to them is sentimental. In Johnson’s Dictionary I discovered an appropriate verb, “to postil”: “To gloss; to illustrate with marginal notes.”