helenic

One of the things I love most about academia is the books. I don't mean any particular content but the books themselves, the editions in college and faculty libraries, which are often beautiful and interesting not only in their age and texture (there's something about the smell of books, the feel of proper binding and canvas or leather covers, the way often the pages are fraying and irregular on one side where they were torn to size) but in the way they're read. Academic library books are the only books, in my experience, where the tradition of reading as an engaged - rather than passive - activity endures. Students leave underlinings, notes, in-jokes and cross-references scrawled across the page with little or no discretion - much of it makes for very amusing reading, particularly when the commentator went on to become a professor or writer themselves. I've seen the articles of people who have lectured me mocked in anonymous pencilled cursive on the way their writing mirrors some ideosyncracy of their lecture style, and on a couple of occasions I've got the joke, even if the note belonged to a much earlier generation of scholars.

I like trying to match the handwritings to the names and dates inscribed beneath each other in the front cover, and the most entertaining reading arises when the various commentators seek to argue with and outdo the previous in the same sort of way as bathroom wall graffiti - only with a much more literary intellectual slant. Just as historical scribes and scholiasts wrote notes, criticisms, thoughts, sketches and even compositions in the margins of many of our ancient manuscripts, so degree students still feel the urge to leave their mark. It's one of my favourite things about buying books second-hand - only in the context of an academic institution one feels an even greater connection to the previous commentators. Even if the pencil scrawls are thirty years old, we are the same age at the time of writing, living in the same environment, reading the same texts and reacting to much of the same scholarship. Reading suddenly becomes more than an author-reader interaction; you have the criticism of other readers to consider as well as your own. It broadens the mind - wondering why has s/he underlined that particular word? does it have some significance I've missed? what does this cryptic comment mean? - and at the same time intensifies the feeling of intimacy, of becoming the other readers almost, whilst at the same time reacting to them.

One day I shall compile a dictionary of amusing, interesting, useful and downright bizarre margin comments in academic texts. My favourite thus far belongs to the Cambridge University Press 1948 edition of W. W. Tarn's biography of Alexander the Great. (I have a particular love for this in any case, as it contains within the back cover the delicious surprise of a fold-out map, carefully drawn, of Alexander's route - surely the greatest beauty a book can boast! ) In the edition belonging to Downing College library there are two commentators, one with a florid cursive style and the other more cramped and angular. The former seems to have developed a fond relationship with the subject of the work ("Oh, Alex ... !" s/he reproves beside a paragraph describing how the commander was outwitted by Darius; "Jesus would disagree," noted thoughtfully after the line no other story has spread like his; and "NO!" next to a suggestion that "Alex" gave no thought to the slave world), makes lists of personal reminders and chronologies, and asks cutting questions ("Officers. Whose?" "Parmenion's," replies the second commentator, in small but firm ink; and a couple of chapters later, in response to the pencilled "What IS this?!" the latter writes scornfully (and with wonderful double irony) "Invention of dialectic, duh!").

But best of all is the final page, which I would photograph if I had a good enough digital camera, but instead I shall type it out:

... Above all, Alexander inspired Zeno's vision of a world in which all men should be members one of another, citizens of one State without distinction of race or institutions, subject only to and in harmony with the Common Law immanent in the Universe, and united in one social life not by compulsion but only by their own willing consent, or (as he put it) by Love. The splendour of this hopeless dream may remind us that not one but two of the great lines of social-political thought which until recently divided the world go back to Alexander of Macedon. For if, as many believe, there was a line of descent from his claim to divinity, through Roman Emperor and medieval Pope, to the great despotisms of yesterday, despotisms "by the grace of God", there is certainly a line of descent from his prayer at Opis, through the Stoics and one portion of the Christian ideal, to that brotherhood of all men which was proclaimed, though only proclaimed, in the French Revolution. The torch Alexander lit for long only smouldered; perhaps it still only smoulders today; but it has never been, and never can be, quite put out.¹

1. I have left the latter part of this paragraph substantially as written in 1926. Since then we have seen new and monstrous births, and are still moving in a world not realised; and I do not know how to rewrite it.

And, as if that footnote were not entertaining enough, the first commentator has added underneath in pencil:

"Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!"