In my study sits an unvarnished copy of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations printed in Edinburgh in 1898.
In the margins of Book IV, in faint, violet fountain pen ink, a previous owner—one A. Campbell, 1914—wrote beside a passage on mortality:
Two months later, Campbell was killed at the First Battle of Ypres.
That pencil scratch is not an imperfection; it is the living communion of human souls across time. When you write your thoughts in the margins of a physical book, you are participating in a multi-century conversation.