The World Unseen

We do not finish reading works like War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, or Moby Dick feeling that we have been enjoying a temporary refuge from reality. We feel rather that we have journeyed into the depths of reality. We may feel even that we have gone more deeply into reality than we would have had the author given a purely factual account of some occurrence in the visible, palpable world. All of which suggests that what is really happening around us—the unfoldment of destiny—is not manifest in “facts,” in public realities and occurrences of the sort anyone can see. Hence those who deliberately confine them selves to facts, such as historians and biographers, thereby commit themselves to the surface of things and eschew the depths accessible to novelists.

― Glenn Tinder, "The Fabric of Hope"

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Dear Kate,

Yesterday for the third time in my life I took out a highlighter to start leaving marks on a book.

I hate leaving marks on a book.  I have probably a thousand sitting on my shelf now, many more packed away, all appear unread.  The only writing should be on the first page my name and a date.

Nothing pisses me off like a creased page or cracked spine.  Coffee stain is a call for fire from heaven.  Clean hands, soiled always as they should be, but there you see the basin before the holy of holies and please help yourself.  Any book deserves not such observance should be burned anyway.

There is carelessness and there is desecration.  To use and discard, retrieve and dismiss is not carelessness.

That's why I cannot accept marking a book, even less doing it myself.  The words are meant to be all of one piece.  Any highlight of insight exists within the context between the covers.  Any subsequent reading a new journey all over again.  What if I am to die today and my books given away?  The book itself, pristine and wholesome, should be the highlighter in a reader's life, calling the attention of the attentive to what needs to be attended to.  I am in no place to call attention to myself.

Last night I decided an exception, a special pardon is needed---and I haven't asked for many in my life, only the third time, as I said.  It was for nothing but my weakness, that I found it necessary to start memorizing passages from the book, fashion a way to go from one sentence to another without losing the gathering tension of the entire journey.  I need to not forget and not forgo because I need all the words to live into the world.

Imagine the world this book is opening up for me.

Yours, Alex