I am an avid reader. The Kindle app on my iPhone tells me that in the first three months of the year, I have already read sixty volumes, to which must be added the ones in paper format that have never found a place in the Kindle.
When I read a book, I cannot help but immerse myself in it. I take notes, underline, dog-ear the pages of paper books, just as I slip anything I can use as a bookmark between the pages.
Once upon a time, I used to transcribe the contents of my underlined passages onto paper notebooks, for future reference, so to speak. With the advent of the Kindle, I stopped doing it, perhaps mistakenly, but continued to underline digitally. I regularly synchronize these passages to my computer using Obsidian and its dedicated plugin for this purpose.
From time to time, I find myself going back to these notebooks and their equivalent in Obsidian. I ask myself the question: what did I underline back then?
Over time, I have become convinced, as Salvo Montalbano would say, that some books come into your life just when you need them. They are perfect for that specific moment in your life, not a week before or a week later. They are “right” only at that moment.
The same is true for the passages I underlined. They were important to me only at that moment. Exceptions are rare.
For this reason, when I browse through my old notebooks, I often wonder what the heck I was thinking at that moment and why I felt it necessary to highlight that particular passage.
I (almost) never manage to give myself an answer, and that’s okay.