The Scrawling
Most pleasures are very simple.
Like Spenser writing his name in a new book — or not even a new book. A ragged, cigarette-lacquered used book will do, so long as it is new to him.
For a long time Spenser didn’t like marking up his books in any way, didn’t flag or highlight what he found memorable or confusing, didn’t annotate or record his thin musings in the margins. For a long time he wanted the pages of his books to be pristine, sharp-cornered. He thinks this was the young comic collector who still lived inside him, the boy who huffed four colour newsprint hours each day, living inside the impossible worlds and yet believing that truly possessing the thing in his hands had nothing to do with the present but was about keeping it safe for some unknown future. He remembers picking up books from his shelves as an adult and thinking in phrases like mint condition and very fine, signs of wear.
That boy lived inside of him for a long time. But Spenser doesn’t feel him anymore.
The first book he wrote his name in was Prairie Fire, an early novel by Benjamin Jensen (New York, Centurion Press, 1972). Mostly amateurish, but punctuated by a few flashes that would come to mark Jensen’s mature style. The Doctor’s philosophical lessons during the buffalo hunt were what most remembered of the novel, but Spenser had discovered layers of nuance and strange beauty in the early homesteading chapters, and in the flashbacks of the McClintock siblings exploring the valley behind their farm. He read the book and loved it, wanted to declare that love, claim ownership of not just the physical book but its contents and the way the words seemed to be written just for him. Spenser wrote his name on the title page, right above Jensen’s, and immediately regretted it. It felt like vandalism, and Spenser spent two years hunting through used bookstores for a replacement copy with a virgin title page.
After that he moved his signature to the first blank page in his new books. He has now done it so often that as he writes he listens for the cadence of his scratching pen. His name has a rhythm all its own. Anyone could write their name in a book, but it wouldn’t sound like this. The purposeful arc of the opening S. The lazy P. The confident right angles of the final T. Paper fibres. Ink. Marking it as his own. Writing himself into it, and over it. A private hex set to ward off past and future.
Someone will find this one day, he used to think. Someone will find this and know the book belonged to me and they will wonder who I was and what I thought about. But no more of that. Spenser realizes that the writing of his name is for him and him alone. When he picks up one of his books and looks at his name on the first blank page he tries to recall who he was when it came into his possession and what he was thinking about when he was that other person.
Underlining sentences is pleasurable too — a sturdy line under the sentences that made him think, that needled something in his chest, took him up and out of a book even as his eyes and brain kept reading, struck by how a well wrought sentence seemed to him to be the only truth, convincing him that the world was magnificent, or horrible, or tragic, or ridiculous. Then Spenser will open up another book and start reading other sentences, and underline the ones that convince him of other truths, truths that travel along his spine and seem to glow on the page. The world is ruined, the world is not ruined but very fragile, the world is not fragile but hiding all around you in plain sight though you can never truly see it.
Sometimes he thinks you can really only know one book in your whole life. One at a time, or maybe only one, ever. Sometimes Spenser thinks the only truth he believes in is the last thing he read. Sometimes he thinks this is a sign of active, worldly intelligence. Sometimes he thinks this is a sign of unspeakable cowardice.
Sometimes he thinks the only true declaration he can make is writing his name in a new book. And so he does. Every time.
←PREVIOUS EPISODE← →NEXT EPISODE→
To start at the first episode, CLICK HERE
_________