do you know me any better, now? (II)
writing in book margins is, I've decided, an intimate act; it's a little like coyly peeling aside an item of clothing, letting readers-to-come see something the text conceals -- a sense of a self lodged amongst the syllables, or something. when I underline paragraphs that resonate, I am exposed, I have divulged something. this morning, reading theodore zeldin, I stumbled across one such paragraph
Her hesitations are the result of a discovery she made in her first year at university, that philosophers are divided about everything, none can claim to be right; that was 'a liberation', wonderful for her self-confidence, because it meant she could have opinions that were worth listening to; but it was disturbing because there has been no end to her questioning. And secondly, she has been infected by the intellectual virus that education can spread in some, the desire to read and read, and force apparent chaos into order, and argue and argue about how things fit together. But then she has doubts: though often excited by her discoveries, sometimes she decides she is not a great thinker: 'Others have always had a higher opinion of my intellectual abilities than I have'.
It may seem from her effervescent manner, her peals of laughter, her warmth, the astuteness of her judgments about people and the sensitivity with which she caresses their vulnerable spots, that she is above all a sociable person. 'People think I am friendlier than I am. I am intimate with only a very few people. I get very quiet if I am worried or upset.' At a first meeting she appears volcanically effusive, but she says, 'I don't like effusive people'. Behind the charm, she is a loner. She is attracted, she says, by thoughtful people, people 'working inside themselves': that is a self-description.
in a kind of frenzied nodding I scrawled six 'yes's down the margins, underlining furiously. I am this woman, I said to myself. yes, yes, yes. when I had finished I felt guilty, transparent; all of a sudden I was so very, very exposed, and the pen was so very purple, so very, very indelible. what will my children think?