Annotated Margins

I have for a long time felt a slight pang of academic guilt at my lack of desire to make insightful little notes in the margins of my books. I like reading new books, and re-reading them once they become old books. And I like them both to be equally pristine. with exceptions made for natural degradation resulting from the passage of time and the addition of dirt and oil from my fingers.

This is not to say that I do not have frequent noteworthy thoughts pop into my head as I read, but rather that I often cannot spare the time to reach for a pen in order to jot them down. And once again, never in the margins. If I do make notes, I make them on a legal pad, in a pocket notebook, or - once - on a length of paper from a receipt printer. For who's to say whether the pages of a given book deserve to be marred by pencil or ballpoint? Least of all by my petty little ideas.

Note 1

I feel wholly unequipped to write about death.