of the Intellect, George Eliot criticizes the author (Robert William Mackay) for writing pages that “read like extracts from his common-place book, which must be, as Southey said of his own, an urn under the arm of a river-god, rather than like a digested result of study, intended to inform the general reader.” Don’t feel you must recirculate everything that you have found (so I tell myself); a recopied passage will urn its keep even if you never quote it anywhere.
There is good to be gained in signing someone else’s mind-signature, in scribbling in tongues: the retracing of a series of long-lost authorial motions with your own present pen, if you do it in the proper spirit, out of a desire to stay delight’s presence rather than out of autodidactic obligation, or even if you begin reluctantly, dutifully, troubled by feelings of self-pelf in the face of so many pressing university-press editions, can calm and steady your state, not to mention improve it, for while the transcribing may appear to be a form of close and exclusive concentration, it has an equally important element of peaceable meditative mindlessness as well, like playing with a paper clip. Reading is fast, but handwriting is slow—it retards thought’s due process, it consumes irreplaceable scupperfuls of time, it pushes every competing utterance away—and that is its great virtue, in fact, over mere underlining, and even over an efficient laptop retyping of the passage: for in those secret interclausal tracts of cleared thought-space, in those extended dreamingblanks of fair-copying between the instant it took the eye to comprehend a writer’s phrase, and the seeming eternity it then takes the hedgehog hand to negotiate that phrase again in legible, physical loops on the notebook page (especially on the verso side of the notebook page, when the spiral binding interferes annoyingly with the muscle of the little finger), during which all of your purplest hopes are compelled to idle, and you must pay attention to some common rhetorical turn that you had never until then deigned to think about, at the same time your constrained prose-aptitude is stimulated to higher rates of metabolism by what Johnson called “the contagion of diligence” and through its temporary forced conformity with another person’s exhaust-system of expression—in this state of rubber-burning, clutch-smoking subservience, new quiet racemes will emerge from among the paving stones and foam greenly up in places they would never otherwise have prospered.
Just don’t do it too much—and always use quotation marks.
(2000)
Inky Burden
Preface to A Book of Books, by Abelardo Morell
I n the old black-and-white TV series, Superman, when he needed to pass through a wall, would put his palms against it and lean, frowning. Gradually his caped form would merge with the plaster and pass through lath and two-by-fours, and then he would reappear in the next room. It wasn’t as easy as flying, apparently, but it could be done. This became my childhood model of reading. You press your mind, your forehead, against the beginning of a book, the cool cover of it, appreciating its impenetrability. It is rectangular and thick, heavy enough to stop a bullet or press a leaf flat. It will, you think, never let you through. And then you begin to lean into it, applying a little attentive pressure, and the early pages begin to curl back with a soft, radish-slicing sound, and you’re in. You’re in the book. The thick, unitary clumps of chapters fan out into their component pages, and each turnedpage dematerializes itself, once read, into the fluent, cajoling voice its words carry, and then you’re past the midpoint, and the book stretches out before you and behind you like a string of paper lanterns in a huge shadowy tent. Then you’re almost done, and the pages begin to shrink and solidify once more. When you reach the last sentence, there rests under your left thumb a monolithic clump of
There is good to be gained in signing someone else’s mind-signature, in scribbling in tongues: the retracing of a series of long-lost authorial motions with your own present pen, if you do it in the proper spirit, out of a desire to stay delight’s presence rather than out of autodidactic obligation, or even if you begin reluctantly, dutifully, troubled by feelings of self-pelf in the face of so many pressing university-press editions, can calm and steady your state, not to mention improve it, for while the transcribing may appear to be a form of close and exclusive concentration, it has an equally important element of peaceable meditative mindlessness as well, like playing with a paper clip. Reading is fast, but handwriting is slow—it retards thought’s due process, it consumes irreplaceable scupperfuls of time, it pushes every competing utterance away—and that is its great virtue, in fact, over mere underlining, and even over an efficient laptop retyping of the passage: for in those secret interclausal tracts of cleared thought-space, in those extended dreamingblanks of fair-copying between the instant it took the eye to comprehend a writer’s phrase, and the seeming eternity it then takes the hedgehog hand to negotiate that phrase again in legible, physical loops on the notebook page (especially on the verso side of the notebook page, when the spiral binding interferes annoyingly with the muscle of the little finger), during which all of your purplest hopes are compelled to idle, and you must pay attention to some common rhetorical turn that you had never until then deigned to think about, at the same time your constrained prose-aptitude is stimulated to higher rates of metabolism by what Johnson called “the contagion of diligence” and through its temporary forced conformity with another person’s exhaust-system of expression—in this state of rubber-burning, clutch-smoking subservience, new quiet racemes will emerge from among the paving stones and foam greenly up in places they would never otherwise have prospered.
Just don’t do it too much—and always use quotation marks.
(2000)
Inky Burden
Preface to A Book of Books, by Abelardo Morell
I n the old black-and-white TV series, Superman, when he needed to pass through a wall, would put his palms against it and lean, frowning. Gradually his caped form would merge with the plaster and pass through lath and two-by-fours, and then he would reappear in the next room. It wasn’t as easy as flying, apparently, but it could be done. This became my childhood model of reading. You press your mind, your forehead, against the beginning of a book, the cool cover of it, appreciating its impenetrability. It is rectangular and thick, heavy enough to stop a bullet or press a leaf flat. It will, you think, never let you through. And then you begin to lean into it, applying a little attentive pressure, and the early pages begin to curl back with a soft, radish-slicing sound, and you’re in. You’re in the book. The thick, unitary clumps of chapters fan out into their component pages, and each turnedpage dematerializes itself, once read, into the fluent, cajoling voice its words carry, and then you’re past the midpoint, and the book stretches out before you and behind you like a string of paper lanterns in a huge shadowy tent. Then you’re almost done, and the pages begin to shrink and solidify once more. When you reach the last sentence, there rests under your left thumb a monolithic clump of
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