Marginalia, and a modest proposal

In “Marginalia,” (which is collected in Picnic, Lightning) Billy Collins writes:

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the border of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard or Conor Cruise O’Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.
…
Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls “Metaphor” next to a stanza of Eliot’s.
Another notes the presence of “Irony”
Fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.
…
And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written “Man vs. Nature”
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

Leaving aside, for the moment, my friend Elaine’s conviction that A Modest Proposal was intended as a serious intervention in British public policy, I’m thinking about the fact that there are certain books that I’m shy about lending out because I’m embarrassed about the marginalia. The attempts to compose poems “after” (or right next to) Lucille Clifton. The fact that the only thing that the freshman reader of the paperback copy of The Woman Warrior had to say was “so true!” The damage to one’s street cred if the person who pages through Blindness and Insight sees the suspicious lack of commentary on the entire last section of “The Rhetoric of Temporality.”

If only all of one’s marginalia testified to one’s muscular intellect, stunning creativity, or prodigious breadth of reading -- “cf. Lessing’s footnote in Laocoön on location of Helen’s mole,” say, or nullo metro compositum est.

Perhaps now is the time to let go of such anxieties because it seems to me that books want to be read, and that most are happy to entertain even the most naïve reader because sometimes she’s the one who is going to be able pick up on a register of meaning, or to draw out an insight that will animate the work anew.