The Marginalian's Method: On the Lost Art of Reading in the Company of Ghosts
We speak of our digital feeds as streams, as gardens, as collections. We curate them with an eye toward the new, the relevant, the immediately useful. But we rarely speak of them as a conversation across centuries. We’ve lost the art of reading in the company of ghosts.
Consider the commonplace book, that pre-digital mainstay of the learned mind. We often picture it as a sterile ledger of quotes, a precursor to the note-taking app. But to stop there is to miss its soul. The most vital commonplace books were not mere archives; they were active sites of argument, a symposium held in margins and on index cards. The reader was not a curator but a host, inviting the great thinkers of the past to sit at their table and debate.
This practice finds its purest, most personal expression in the marginalia—the notes, underlines, and exclamations scribbled directly in the book's gutters. While many have left these traces, one figure stands out not for his fame, but for the breathtaking intimacy of his engagement: the English mathematician and lawyer Samuel Pepys.
Pepys is remembered for his diary, a stunningly candid chronicle of 17th-century life. But his library, preserved at Magdalene College, Cambridge, reveals another layer of his intellect. His books are not pristine artifacts; they are battlefields of thought. He didn’t just read; he collided with texts. He corrected authors’ grammar, noted contradictions, and cheered them on with fervent “N.B.”s (Nota Bene—note well!) in the margins. He was in constant dialogue with the author, treating the book not as a sacred monologue but as the opening argument in a spirited debate.
This is a world away from our current model of knowledge capture. We highlight a passage and it vanishes into a database, neatly tagged and stripped of its original context. The friction, the immediate emotional response—the “Yes, exactly!” or the “This can’t be right!”—is often lost in the transfer. We process the idea, but we sanitize the encounter.
Pepys’s method argues for a different approach. It suggests that the most valuable part of reading online might not be the clean, portable idea, but the messy, visceral reaction it provokes. It’s the heat of the moment, captured. His marginalia are a record of a mind at work, not a mind that has finished its work. They are the opposite of a resolved conclusion; they are the spark of a thought just beginning.
Perhaps our digital feeds and note-taking systems need a little more of this Pepysian spirit. What if, instead of just saving an article, we were compelled to leave a note of protest or agreement right there in our digital margin? What if our curation was less about building a perfect library and more about hosting a lifelong, raucous conversation with every author we encounter? The goal wouldn’t be a tidy repository, but a living record of a mind in conversation with others, across time. It wouldn’t be a knowledge base, but a knowledge feast, and every ghost would have a seat at the table.
Notes & further reading
A few pages I came back to while writing this: