I just posted this to notes with the preface: “This is literally just from my notes—not enough thought to be a post, but more than enough to write down. Enjoy!” After which point I realized that this is actually too long for ‘Notes’… so enjoy, it is far from a comprehensive meditation. It really is just something floating around in my notes.
When I read, I markup books. Often my books are ruined: creases, rips, water damage, humidity curling, soup, coffee, mustard stains, straight pen markings and jiggly pen markings. This is because I take books on the metro, in the car, I throw them in purses. I read in the thermal baths, at the spa, I read in my bath, and in my sauna, at the beach. I read when I eat, I walk and I read, most of all I read over coffee on my lunch breaks.
I hardly ever remember what I read. It’s embarrassing because I read a lot. mostly frustrating frankly.
Why I started a substack: I was afraid that if I didn’t use it, I’d loose it.
But what I’m finding—reading new texts in a more instrumental way, also going back through beloved texts and making notes—is that for those books I have read physically, I have great recall for them once I am fingering back through them. The rips, the stains, I remember them happening. Where they happened. So once I have the most salient of their teachings, and a hallucination of the time and place that I was reading, suddenly the text comes back to me.
It made me think that this supports memory as different from memorization. That to remember a text is not to take the contents of the text and ‘put’ it in my brain. But rather to take a detour of attention, and to tread it through the text, in these cases letting myself ‘land’ on paper. Perhaps remembering consists not in going down to the basement and grabbing a jar of spring preserve, but in going back out into spring to find the myself who picked the fresh strawberry.
That by reading I am not concentrating something in me but spreading my self-constituting awareness/experience out into the world. Sometimes into the objects of the world but maybe sometimes into texts… as semantic media? The sounds of words in my heads? The feelings they elicit?
Used book stores are so romantic. I bought a book earlier this year and in the front page was scribbled the name Jeff. Jeff, like me, had only read half the book and marked up the bits he wanted to flag for return. I loved reading through it with someone else’s tracings, his one-three word margin notes really gave me a different perspective. I felt that because Jeff had been there, in a way he kind of was there. Not that he put the book in his brain but that he left himself in the book. Felt sort of like the distant communications of two mountain lions, scent-marking a granite outcrop.
Ha, I do not like reading through someone else's notes!
However, yes, I had never thought about it this way until today... I do think my recall is stronger with a physical book. Something about the way my brain recreates the text on that particular part of the page with that underline, or crease, or blemish on the page. Hmmm... interesting. I'm going to have to keep this in mind. (Except, wait, does that mean we need to go back to physical newsletters??!)
Love this and agree with the sentiment as someone has zero memory recall. Had a similar experience recently, pulled St Augustine’s Confessions off my shelf after someone mentioned Neoplatonism in conversation and I couldn’t remember if I had actually read through it cover to cover during school only to find it full of sticky tabs. Flipping through it was cool seeing what resonated with me back then/what still does now.