Marginalia
Jan 18 2025
I wonder just how old
those Britannicas were
in the school library’s hushed confines
of carpeted floors and burnished wood.
Back in the day
before I too got old.
An alphabetical row
of magisterial books
bound in royal blue.
A palace guard of books
set on the shelf
with weighty solemnity,
stiff spines touching
in a neatly ordered line.
Everything about this
was authoritative;
the last word,
no subject too small.
As if to proclaim
that there was no excuse
for epistemological uncertainty.
How reassuring
that the world was both knowable
and unchanging;
that within these pages
all knowledge resided.
But we were deferential, back then,
trusted the experts
deferred to authority.
And these tomes
were like the stone tablets
Moses delivered to Israel;
handed-down from on-high
and weighty as monoliths.
Which is why the sarcastic comments
and lewd drawings
scrawled in the margins
seemed so subversive to me,
so thrillingly contemptuous
of the powers that be.
That some nascent revolutionary
with adolescent facial hair
and bad fashion sense
who didn’t bother with deodorant
had the gall to question
the received wisdom
those omniscient tomes dispensed.
Back when we could reassure ourselves
that the world was fixed,
even though we ourselves
were unformed teens
straddling constantly shifting tectonic plates.
While today, in a world of bone-rattling change
and daunting uncertainty,
our outlook has ossified
into strict ideologies
self-righteous beliefs.
If only I could shout
rage
thumb my nose
like that anonymous kid
who defiled the sacred books.
But there is no Britannica anymore,
at least not in print.
No blank space
in which to write,
nothing with the permanence of a page
in a hallowed book
where I might be heard.
Nor is there the stern librarian
standing guard
on the collected works of Man
before the barbarians;
mouthing insistent shhhhh’s
and keeping a watchful eye
on a room full of miscreants.
No more Britannicas
weighing down the shelf
with unquestioned authority.
No hard-cover book
from the island rump
of a once great empire,
telling us
in the plummy English of its class
all is well with the world.
I apologize to all the kindly and motherly librarians (and now, I guess, to all the male librarians!), because the only school librarian I remember (in this case, junior high) was Mrs. Armstrong, whom we derisively called “Grizz”. In retrospect, of course, I think she meant well and was a committed educator. But we were cruel and immature, and I suppose denigrating her was an act of teenage conformity, our need to belong.
Have we gone from too little change to too much too fast; relative silence to cacophony? Are there now too many voices, opinions, competing authorities? Sometimes, one good encyclopedia seems preferable to the Babel of the internet. Especially in an age where opinion takes the place of fact, and everyone’s “truth” is taken as equally legitimate.
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