This basic practice has transformed me from a passive reader to a thinker among other thinkers.

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Sometime last year, I bought a second-hand book of "Camera Lucida". In this slender text, French literary theorist and semioticist Roland Barthes expounds his theory of photography as a collaboration between the viewer and the watched, centered on Barthes’ so-called thorn point: jumping out of the image And "stinging" (usually marginal) details. "The viewer carries a strange, often inexplicable emotion.

While watching a family portrait in the 1920s, Barthes stared at a middle-aged woman wearing lace-up high heels. He suddenly realized that the braided gold necklace she was wearing was the necklace of his unmarried aunt. This necklace belongs to both the woman's life and his own life. So, as Bart wrote, the thorn point "is something I added to the photo, but it is still something that already exists."

In my copy, this last sentence has been underlined and bracketed. Someone wrote "Yes!" in the blank space. In fact, when I read through the book, I found that on every page, the former owner found something worth noting, marked line by line with a thick pencil. , Lists Bart’s arguments, and leaves a lot of comments. When I read Barthes' book, I couldn't help but read another reader. I picked up my pencil and started writing with the Phantom Reader.

This habit is a new habit to me. Before the epidemic, I was not accustomed to writing in books: facing the words on the pages of the book, my thoughts seemed pitiful. The facts of a book tell a series of events-writing, selling, editing, printing-before that I felt unworthy.

But when New York City closed in March 2020, my self-awareness and position in the world also closed. For several months, I seldom leave my apartment, except to see my ex or take a long walk at night, when the city was quiet and there was no one on the street. The scope of my world has become no larger than that of my neighbors. I hardly saw anyone and kept few reservations. I rewatched "The Silent Lamb" four times in two months. Even my daily reading became a self-defeating slogan, and the entire page slipped away without me remembering. My heart became a sieve.

Sometime that summer, I picked up the novella "The Old Child" by German novelist Jenny Erpenbeck (The Old Child), and I was reading it at the time, writing for an article Prepare. This is a strange, opaque story about a seemingly adolescent girl who was taken to an orphanage because she refused to speak. Although it is certainly not my favorite Erpenbeck, it marked a change in my reading life: on page 60, I marked a date-February 13-and added an exclamation point. I made an asterisk at the top of the next page and wrote: "Forgetting is a protection."

These are thoughtless comments, and I feel embarrassed to share them. But they are the first notes I wrote in the published book. When I picked up my next book, I underlined the key phrases, stroked the moving paragraphs, and marked the margins. Every sentence seems to be more vivid, and every word is more specific, as long as I write on, on, and around it. My edges became a series of handles on a calm and smooth page. I caught a stupid little mark of my daily experience at a time.

Sometimes I underline the densest and most difficult part of the novel; sometimes it is beautiful, ugly or clumsy. I find that my eyes are drawn to certain phrases: Flaubert’s way of describing the stiff, wrinkled face of “a person with failed ambitions”, or Gillian Rose’s claim that “there is no democracy in any romantic relationship: there is only mercy. ." Sometimes I add my own notes in the margins, even though they have very little substance. Reading the subsequent volume of Proust during the breakup, I filled the margins with uncomfortable ellipsis, onomatopoeia groans, and other things.

I hope I have deep ideas to connect, but I don’t always think of them when reading. My notes are like the annual rings of a tree, capturing the atmosphere of a particular moment. Like Barthes' necklaces, their existence resonates more than their actual content, because they remind me of myself. The things you bring to the work interact with the things that always exist, and the things you bring are always changing.

Wait long enough, and what you bring becomes text. The reason these notes resonate is because they revise a person's mind so thoroughly in time that they no longer read it like you do. Why do I care so much about the protection features of February 13 or Forgotten? I really do not know. However, in the summer of 2020, these two issues seem to be so important that they completely changed my reading habits: my notes changed me from a passive reader to a thinker among other thinkers.

Re-reading "Camera Lucida" for this article, I am not always sure who made which mark, and who of us left which notes. Which are Bart’s ideas, which are mine, and which are Phantom Reader’s? does it matter? Books and margins are both acts of writing, a collaboration between the author and the subject, the text and the reader-exactly the kind of common meaning creation that Barthes refers to. We all scribble in the blank spaces, hoping that one day our ideas can become their own words.

Robert Rubsam is a freelance writer and critic. He finally wrote an article about the swamp corpse for the magazine.