··1 min read·Books
Marginalia is the Dialogue Across Centuries
In my study sits an unvarnished copy of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations printed in Edinburgh in 1898.
In the margins of Book IV, in faint, violet fountain pen ink, a previous owner—one A. Campbell, 1914—wrote beside a passage on mortality:
Two months later, Campbell was killed at the First Battle of Ypres.
That pencil scratch is not an imperfection; it is the living communion of human souls across time. When you write your thoughts in the margins of a physical book, you are participating in a multi-century conversation.