I recently opened a novel I had read last year and found a sentence underlined in blue ink. I didn’t remember the chapter or plot in the book in which it appeared. In fact, I could barely recall the sentence itself. Yet for reasons unknown to me now, that sentence had once been important enough for a younger version of myself to annotate a line beneath it.
These traces during the reading of what once took over entire worlds in your mind are what I like to call a vestige. These are the small things that remain after the grander part of it is rendered largely forgotten. Reading, precisely, is filled with such vestiges.
We finish a book believing we will remember everything. That it is so life-changing. We flip through the last pages overwhelmed by the characters, world, and the beautiful words. For several days, in fact, we might continue to think about it. We even recommend it to friends and repeat our favorite lines. But eventually, and inevitably, another book takes its place. Memories of these once life-changing books become muddied and faded as time marches on. But perhaps a book never leaves us entirely.
There are novels I have forgotten almost completely but still associate with a particular distinct feeling. I remember the comfort and solace from Ocean Vuong, but not really what happened between him and his mother. I can recall visceral disgust and hopelessness from No Longer Human, but not the major events of Yozo’s life. That is all to say, I may not remember the original story, but some remnant of it continues to follow me and impact our lives. It persists without demanding to be remembered.
Books remain in the language we use and the ideas we carry. A character can teach us to understand a type of loneliness we have experienced but never actualized into words. A narrator may persuade us to observe the mundane more. Slowly, literature alters how we perceive the world.
We readers also leave our own vestiges behind as well. I once read a thrifted book and got sentimental at the folded corners of pages, coffee-stained covers, and small annotations between lines. We often write hurried reactions in margins, underline beautiful sentences. These markings become records of our former selves. Sometimes, I return to my old annotations and wonder why a single line in a story mattered so deeply to me. These words remain the same, but the reader does not.
That is why rereading feels so peculiar, and why giving away a beloved book can feel strangely intimate. Because the remnants of our past selves exist within these books, manifesting as physical proof. For this very reason, physical books are very dear to me. It gathers parts of our reading emotion that the digital often cannot.
And so the final page may end the story, but the vestige persists in our lives, in the subconscious changes to the way we may write or speak, and the past versions of ourselves can be evident in the books that become windows of what once was.
