Several years ago, I was attending an anthropology conference in New Orleans, and I was rooming with Professor Kenneth Pike, who for many years was the President of our organization, SIL International (now SIL Global). He showed me a book he was reading (I forget the title) but it was marked up, had words and even whole paragraphs underlined, with exclamation marks, circles, and lines drawn from one place to another throughout the pages. If he had used colored underlining markers, It would have resembled some sort of artistic mosaic.
I have always marked up my books, but I had never seen anything so dramatic and (to me) confusing. When I asked him, Dr Pike told me what he was thinking about on a particular page and why he marked up the book in such a surrealistic (to me) manner.
Pike was a linguistic theoretician, a professor at the U. of Michigan, who saw much of the world, and especially articles and books, in terms of his own linguistics theory. He looked at how words and whole paragraphs supported his theory. In a way, he was “underlining” the thoughts that had provided substance for his book, “Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior,” the magnum opus that was published in 1967 (Mouton, 762pp). And yes, I have tried to read it!
When I see something in a book that grabs my attention, I underline it because the sentence makes me pause and think about what I have read. Most of my C.S. Lewis books are well underlined, although I have resorted to just a vertical mark by the item to save time and ink.
Joice loved to underline, double underline, circle words and put exclamation marks and notes in the margins of the books she was reading. I love to read them and see what she might have been thinking. One of her entries was in expressing delight in God’s law and she underlined “God’s revelation consists not of hard rules to be kept, not of restricted limitations to be endured, but of ways to walk in happiness and praise!” She wanted to enjoy and celebrate the laws of God.
I taught “Screwtape Letters” to a few people several times and my book is underlined throughout with passages that spoke to me (and I hoped would speak to others). For example, when Screwtape outlines plans on how to rescue his client from the Enemy [God], he says, “We want him to be in the maximum uncertainty, so that his mind will be filled with contradictory pictures of the future, every one of which arouses hope or fear. There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human's mind against the Enemy. He wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them.” When I underlined that paragraph, I was thinking of some of my friends who were uncertain about their salvation and were anxious to see what they could do about it.
I have all the books that C.S. Lewis ever wrote, including some of his introductions to other books, and shorter essays. The small book “Introduction to St. Athanasius: On the Incarnation,” (Centenary Press, 1944)., contains this gem, which I highlighted:
“[Athanasius] stood for the Trinitarian doctrine, “whole and undefiled,” when it looked as if all the civilised world was slipping back from Christianity into the religion of Arius—into one of those “sensible” synthetic religions which are so strongly recommended to-day and which, then as now, included among their devotees many highly cultivated clergymen. It is his glory that he did not move with the times; it is his reward that he now remains when those times, as all times do, have moved away.” (p. 9) What an important reminder for me!
Because I love to mark up my books, it is more difficult for me to use Kindle to read books online. I realize I can mark up Kindle as well, I have also found it difficult to cite the page numbers, although that problem seems to be resolved now as well.
I spent one summer boarding and working at a town in Pennsylvania where a Jewish company had set up a tomato packing establishment and were buying tomatoes from local Amish farmers. I became a friend with the Jewish manager of the firm, and he noted how marked up my Bible was and commented that he could never do that to his Torah. I must have seemed profane and sacrilegious to him.
I am sure that I will never stop underlining, at least here on earth. For my One Year Bible, I decided to do a different color for each year, but I stopped after green and yellow and went back to my ballpoint pen. It is hard to make a small and legible note in the margin with a yellow or green highlighter!
I am so thankful that I have Bibles and books to read and underline. I notice that my kids and their kids do much the same.
All for now,
Karl
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