Underlined words
As it tells the story of our time, the Century makes readers and writers of us all.
In Valeria Luiselli’s novel Lost Children Archive, the narrator tells us: “I don’t keep a journal. My journals are the things I underline in books.”
When I read that sentence, I underlined it. I try to keep a journal, but I manage only intermittent entries. Underlining passages in books, though—I do that every day.
A few years ago I began transcribing the underlined passages I most wanted to remember into a notebook. Medieval readers (monks, mostly) called passages like these “sparklets,” bits of text so arresting that they seem to sparkle up from the page. Monastic readers transcribed these sparklets in collections called florilegia, a word that evokes flowers in a garden. Luiselli’s narrator describes the light such sparklets produce—the light that flickers in our brain when we come across words for something we have experienced but have never had the language to describe. Something we underline so we won’t forget.
