Margins
By Jonathan Haeber

He was really fond of books. His favorite author was Melville. But that wasn't the only thing he was fond of. He had many interests. Once, when he was 18, he came up with a theory. The theory was revolutionary. But no one asked him about, so it just died with him, but remained intact in yellowed pages.

No one paid attention to him in High School. He was always reading-Melville, mostly.

His handwriting is unique. Eccentric swooping I's and majestic capital Q's litter the rambling of his genius. On page 798, he wrote in the margin: "I Love This!" My personal favorite, though, is page 624 where he drew a picture of his dream girl right under the description of Ahab's monomania. She was drawn in the green ink of a Bic round stic, medium point.

Her hair came down to her waist in waves. She had a small pudgy nose and made dimples when she smiled. Her eyelashes fluttered ahead of her, and her kneecaps were oddly shaped. There is no better way to describe, than to say she was perfectly imperfect.

He usually ate pizza, and his favorite topping was linguica. But mixed in, especially on chapters, 63-75 is the smell of a woman's perfume. That chapter of his life ended at 75 and who knows what happened to her.

He started reading the book when he was 13. His 7th grade English teacher gave it to him as a gift. Her writing, in black fine point marker pen, was only on the front leaf of the book. Her G's were small and constrained and the tails of her letters never exceeded 3mm. She may have once tried to be creative, but gave up when her query was rejected and she decided to become a teacher.

Adam-that's his name-was creative. I'm sure she saw that in him. Maybe she wanted to vicariously play her failed life over again in him by sparking his interest in literature. He had the gift of writing, even in his margins.

There was no pretense in his writing. He was as honest as Abe. When he laughed at a passage, he wrote: "Ha! Ha!" When he cried, a small concentric circle on the page was wrinkled from being wet.

At times, he read vigorously, finishing a hundred pages in a single sitting. I could tell this by his use of dog-ears as bookmarks. But he was a procrastinator too. Either that, or he knew that the more he read, the sooner it would end, and he didn't want it to end.

It took him eight years to get to page 969. He only had 31 pages left. His handwriting improved through the years. The tails at the end of his words were shrinking. His letters were getting smaller and more compact. One could say it was more coherent, but my thought was that it was more average.

Starting with page 804, he used the same ink, even through different sittings. There were no more dog-ears on the top corners of the pages. He didn't laugh as much anymore. He may have cried, but the tear marks were no longer present after page 796. He just cried inside more. The tears disappeared.

His margins were not his thoughts, they were others'. His economics professor wrote through his handwriting on page 876: "Perhaps, the White Whale represents John Locke's proposal, while Ahab represents a socialist economic sector." His English professor wrote the most for him, once vociferating: "This passage personifies the Romantic to Victorian transition… Possible paper topic???" The only way one could tell it was still he, was the handwriting, although his handwriting began to die with him.

Upper-Division courses took the best out of him. The glowing green ink of his adolescence faded into a black felt-tip marker. The pages were more crisp and clean. Unblemished.

Professors taught him the value of books to the point that he stopped writing in them. His ideas stayed in his head, and laughing and crying at passages were for the "romance" and "trash" novel readers. Analyzing was a task. Reading became a test. Literature was serious business.

On page 500, his theory resounds as the only living and breathing aspect of his past life: "Melville is a poet! I can feel, taste, smell, touch, and see every detail in his writing. This is what life is made of: the taste of hardtack, the smell of the ocean zephyr, the touch of the pine oars, and the vision of perfection in imperfection."

Sitting under the word "imperfection," and above the page number was a blank spot. I felt compelled to fill the space in, just as a reminiscent hankering. I pulled out a black pen from my desk in the cubicle, wrote the word down, and tossed the book in the bottom drawer beneath six-month old press releases and classified ad copy.
The word "nostalgia" will always be above 500 and below imperfection.