The Understory

In a managed forest the first thing they remove is the understory, and the first thing you notice is the silence. The pines stand in rows with their accounts in order; the light falls in clean, taxable columns; and nothing moves at ankle height, because everything that lived there — the rot, the moss, the deadfall nursing its slow generation of seedlings — has been tidied into piles and carted off.* It is still a forest, in the sense that a summary is still a book. My grandfather, who cruised timber for the state for four decades, called such plantations kirjahylly — bookshelf — and did not mean it kindly.

I grew up in the other kind of forest and the other kind of library. Our farmhouse outside Suonenjoki held perhaps two hundred books, and every one of them had been annotated by somebody dead.† My grandmother argued with her hymnal. A great-uncle had worked through a Swedish grammar in the winter of 1944, his pencil pressing harder as the war news worsened, so that you could read the front’s advance in the depth of his conjugations. Nobody taught me that marginalia were the understory of a text — the layer where fallen readings decay and feed the next one — but nobody had to. I could see the mushrooms coming up through the type.

The forest sciences have lately given us a vocabulary for what the tidy plantations lack: the underground commerce, root to fungus to root, by which a forest turns out to be less a collection of trees than a negotiation among them.‡ I want to spend this essay pressing that metaphor until it either breaks or holds, because I think it describes reading better than our usual figures do. A text with clean margins is a monoculture. It photosynthesizes; it yields; it can be harvested for quotation. But a text that has been read — really read, read with a pencil, read by three people who disagreed — develops an understory, and it is in that layer, not in the canopy of the author’s intention, that a literature actually regenerates.