August 18, 2013

Literature and Courage

This afternoon I opened a brand new Norton Critical Edition of Howard’s End. Though I’ve never read the book before, the familiar typeface and smooth pages that so clearly identify a Norton text brought back a flood of memory. How many hours did I spend studying similar pages? Countless hours, working my way through the canon from “The Wanderer” to Wordsworth, sifting through footnotes that served more to slacken my pace than actually illuminate the work (except in the case of The Canterbury Tales, during which I needed those notes very much). Toward the end of my undergraduate tenure I always read with a pen in my hand, ready to underline or add marginalia as need arose.

That felt blasphemous at first—defacing a book, adding my own thought to an author’s words. But eventually I learned to interact with literature, conversing with the text instead of just listening to it. Of course my contribution to the conversation was primarily a series of unanswered questions or ponderous “mmhmm”s, but still, I’d come a long way.