Documenting Documentary Work, Life in the Margins

Genius Loci readers:

Like August, September was jammed packed. I continue to be slammed with obligations and details I needn’t bore you with. But these past two months got me thinking about the composition of our lives, especially what makes them meaningful. After a short personal update, I’ll share some half-baked thoughts on what it means to live life in the margins.

Personal Update

I don’t have much time this month, so I’ll be brief:

My new YouTube video is live. It is a POV-style film where you follow me as I document Cerro Calvario in Bolivia using a few cameras.

With the video finished, I’ve returned to writing. I finished writing some notes on mountains in the book of Deuteronomy, rounding out the Pentateuch. I also wrote about the Arc’teryx firework controversy on the Tibetan plateau and what our online discourse reveals about our cultural ignorance.

October brings a few podcast interviews, after which I’ll turn my attention to mountains in one of the greatest poems in classical Sanskrit: The Birth of Kumára by Kālidāsa.

Life in the Margins

I am a middle-aged male human, sitting on my couch in the precious morsel of free time I have, reading the biography of an accomplished writer who led an interesting, if tragic, life.

Lance Richardson’s new biography of Peter Matthiessen, True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen, has accompanied me this busy month — which has itself forced me to reflect on time, how we spend it, and what our lives are made of. But it was less Matthiessen’s story itself than the book as an object — as a metaphor — that provoked an idea.

In books as in life, its magic happens in the margins.

If a biographer were to write my biography, what stories would one include?

A biography of my life wouldn’t be worth reading. My first three decades were lost years — lost to youth and lost to universities. The time in my fourth and, now, fifth decades has been mostly consumed by a career that I’ve complained about before: in a Venn diagram, the nature of my employment and what I find to be interesting and worth doing in this life overlap only a smidge.

Yet despite our day jobs consuming a disproportionate amount of our time on this earth, some of us strive to live interesting lives and do interesting things.

My biographer wouldn’t write about how many students or classes I’ve taught, how many committees I’ve served on, or how many meetings I’ve attended. My biographer won’t write about how many days I’ve showed up to work despite feeling under the weather, despite facing personal hardship. A biographer wouldn’t address any of it. But a biographer might write about (the failures of) the creative life I’m trying to live on the margins of this job.

Isn’t the working man the happiest in the margins of his life?

For the conventional worker today, our lives are like the pages of a book, most of which are consumed by another person’s narrative and ideas. The story is written by other people or other forces (our bosses, our context, our culture, our society), and we follow along. Yet, we have an opportunity to take notes in the margins.

The margin is the most interesting part of a book. This is where the thinking and connections happens. This is where a book gets owned, where it makes and impact, where it relates to a reader. There is not a lot of space in the margin relative to the other text, and what we’re able to contribute there is concise, fleeting, fragmentary, yet dense.

The margins of our lives are the weekends, the evenings, the holidays, the lunch breaks, the quiet moments where we are left to our own devices.

It is a pity that life has been relegated to the margins in the first place. Yet these are the moments that we remember most. Perhaps we remember them most because these moments are the rarest in today’s world of all-consuming work. We only have a few holidays a year, after all. And those days are markedly different than the weeks we spend under fluorescent tubes. But I would like to believe that we remember these moments most not because they’re rare, but because they’re the moments in which we feel most alive. We spend our time doing the things we want and living through moments we all seek: creating, being around family, enjoying our solitude, thinking, falling in love, reading. As Byung-Chul Han notes in his book Vita Contemplativa, culture is created in spite of the modern condition of all-consuming work, not because of it.

What we “write in the margins” - the “inactive” and “unproductive” time we spend living outside of our day jobs — helps us make sense of the story. It gives our lives meaning.

For many of us, we are too fatigued in the evenings to think. On the weekends, too busy catching up with chores and errands to enjoy what little time is available. It is all too easy to surrender to Netflix or TikTok. Yet it is precisely because this time is so vulnerable that it is so precious.

Let’s not surrender. Let’s aim to increase the white space — to increase our margins so that they’re no longer marginal. To make more room for our story. To have more space dedicated to ourselves. To contribute more of our own selves and creative energy to this life. To not feel guilty or unproductive doing so. This is the goal at least, to have a page where the space dedicated to the text block and the margins have inverted.

That’s all for this month.

Thanks for reading and farewell,

JB