in praise of underlining
Why underline?
It’s not as if I need to go back and re-read anything that I’ve previously read. This is adulthood. School’s out. There are no tests. I need not compile research, need not organize my notes and annotations. My underlines are not academic.
Nor is it like when I sang in the college choir, preparing for performance, taking a pencil to the sheet music, making small notations or comments based on the conductor’s instructions, reminders of where to breathe or how to pronounce a certain word in Latin or German – GOht, not GAht.
Why do I underline? What’s the use of this practice, this habit, this thing I do that I don’t exactly need to do and yet can’t imagine ever quitting?
All habits have origin stories, whether or not we remain conscious of and committed to those origins. All habits are formed. But not all habits are based in some clearly articulated purpose and intention. Not all habits begin because someone told you once it would optimize something in your life. Some are simply rooted in an encounter, an epiphany, a moment.
Once, between semesters in college, during a long overseas flight, I was reading my book and keeping to myself when I glanced across the aisle and noticed another man reading his book and keeping to himself. He was older. More professional. There we were, mirrored across the aisle, reading in our solitudes, me stepping out of my solitude briefly to notice him. And that’s when I saw it. When he paused to underline something on the page, he wouldn’t just put the pen to the page and drag a line under the words or phrases as I had always done: using only the unsteady pull of my own hand across the page to make the mark. No. He turned his bookmark — a 3x5 index card — perpendicular to the words on the page and, after aligning the bookmark’s long edge in place, dragged the tip of his pen across the top edge of the card, leaving a straight line in ink under the words.
This might sound small and insignificant. Perhaps it even sounds obvious. But for me, in that small moment, at an age when I was slowly realizing that reading was becoming, for better or worse, a significant part of my life, this was akin to religious experience, like reaching open palms outward to receive the bread and wine and knowing without being able to prove it that it is more than merely bread and wine. This moment, this act observed, more than bread and wine.
As a reader I had always felt compelled to underline words, phrases, or passages that stood out to me. But when left to my own devices, I struggle. In this instance I mean that phrase literally: left my own devices meaning the pen held by my unsteady hand. I am left-handed, and I’ve always felt a disorienting alienation from the mere composition of a book printed in English, the way the sense-making of our language flows from left to right, top to bottom, and yet the way my brain and body orient my writing hand to the world, I naturally want to pull the pen or pencil from right to left, upstream from the flow of the sentence.
If I could speak, read, or write in a language that moved from right to left, I sometimes wonder if the world might make some kind of new sense to me. I say all of this not because my left-handedness causes me great suffering or inconvenience. Sometimes there are inconveniences. But mostly I am grateful to live in a century and country that does not see my left-handedness as something diagnosable or abominable, demanding extermination. I am not under the threat that I would have been in a different time and place, for instance, merely 80 years ago under Nazi rule. No. I am safe. Merely inconvenienced. Praise be.
When it comes to the page, my left-handedness poses new questions. As a writer, I tend to love this situation dearly, the blank page that I am drawn to mark on. Yet with our language moving from left to right and top to bottom, like all lefties, I have learned (or have struggled to learn) how to hold my hand in a certain posture so that my hand does not immediately obscure the words I’ve just written or drag across the page, pulling ink and making a mess of what I’ve written on the page and on the heel of my hand.
When it comes to underlining, it’s not as though I am required to make the underline move from left to right, but neither have I ever been good at making a straight line move from right to left. When it comes to underlining, either option is possible, and yet in both directions, by my own naked hand, my underlining yields squiggles, zig-zags, diagonal accidents. My hand on its own does not hold still or keep straight.
I underline to plant a flag. I underline to remember, to retain, to make a mark, to make my own remark. I underline for the sensation of physically marking the moment I cherished or hated or questioned a word or a phrase or a sentence. I underline to help me recall the location of an essential sentence, so that in case my mind strays to far from it I can always walk to the bookshelf, find the book, thumb through the pages, scan quickly for my underlines, and find it, yes, here it is, I remember now:
“He had fallen from his nest in a maple tree and was huddled brokenboned groaning in the mud and leaf litter.”
Looks like this Friday evening in Kansas City is going to be just right for a stroll through the Crossroads. Hope you’ll come by Bad Seed if you’re so inclined. I’m excited to show some new work in collaboration with my friend Elaine Buss, and also to share the space with the one and only John Raux. Hope you can stop by.
What I’m currently listening to: Leif Vollebekk
What I’m currently reading: Brian Doyle’s Mink River
PEACE,
Andrew