Interesting people are drawn to the margins. The fringes of things, the edge. Not the cliff edge of risk but the page edge of possibility. It’s not that Aristotle and St. Thomas and Isidore of Seville were not interesting, but they lived in a day when knowledge still needed to be gathered together, collected, connected. There was a time when a genius could write out a dictionary alone and create something substantial enough to endure. And in such a time interesting minds could be drawn to create some new and living center around which to weave interrelatedness.
It’s different now.
Now the world is one vast huddle. The spheres of knowledge have grown together, merged. There is no bringing things together when everything touches everything somewhere. Six degrees of Kevin Bacon indeed. Thanks to whatever we name this age, you’re lucky if it’s one degree of Kevin Bacon, if he exists one person removed from you and your person, if you haven’t already merged with him in some perverse melding of game and reality.
The encyclopedist does not now collect things together, they separate things out, rejecting more than they include. From the enormity of existing knowledge, they carve out some simplified and therefore falsified reality. Clustered in huge mobs around indistinguishable points, the billions sort themselves into shifting amoebas with soft borders and indeterminate distinctions. The mob and the encyclopedist alike identify meaningless loci and make imaginary divisions in a single taste, thinking to craft a manageable reality out of everything, everywhere, all the time.
“I am a gardener.” some indistinguishable face declares and by that they mean that they too, bought a bag of soil and a hybrid tomato outside the home improvement store – not that one, the other identical one – and stuck in a plastic pot the sturdy herbicided and fertilized contrivance.
“I am a reader.” says another and they mean that this year their eyes have passed over the digitized pages of all the best sellers sold under the name of a long-retired author whose labor is duplicated now by an AI and a small staff of editors. A million words generated and skimmed to reproduce ten or twelve essentially identical plots of romance or mystery or thriller or fantasy.
And thus, the margins. The edges of things. The little blank space where a caret, an asterisk, an exclamation point, or new and different words can be written in. Where a tiny sketch of a diagram can live. Where an unusual word can be translated, where your thought, yours alone, can live.
The margins are narrowing, but they’re still there, still blank, still inviting. And you find not only are the more interesting people there, playing in some margin, but you too are more interesting when you show up there.
There is a minor egoism manifest in the margin-dwellers. Not that they think themselves more important than the author as they mark their book, but that they think their own living thought worth writing down there on the edge. They may become protagonists but their marginalia is not that which makes them so. It is no more than a seed from which something greater may grow, but seed is often sown along the margins, springing up perhaps, or perhaps only being eaten by some passing bird, but the sowing, well, that was interesting too.