Footnote Fever

Sometimes, the only seeming justification for continuing a blog is the expectation of an ever-increasing readership. If I am telling my innermost thoughts and feelings to complete strangers, one thinks, I should at least tell those thoughts and feelings to as many strangers as I possibly can. I am guilty of this, but I also know that my numbers have hit a plateau. Having, at present, fallen out with Wilbur, my former pupil (maybe fodder for tomorrow's post), I must foray into the blogosphere to find new friends and fresh ideas to emulate.

I recently stumbled upon a fascinating blog--fascinating for the fact that, although the author writes but one sentence per day, the blog has seen several thousand visitors. The One Million Footnotes blog includes this Prospectus:

Footnotes to a nonexistent book, a series of observations, a novel without the plot, the autobiography of an imagination, linked poetry of the everyday world, an impossible goal.

Most posts convey a metaphor, some catch a sentence in mid-stream, and a few present a story in themselves. I'll leave you to explore the blog, but the entries go something like this (I've borrowed examples from others so as not to steal Mr. OneMillionFootnotes' thunder):

"Upward behind the onstreaming it mooned."

or this:

"In the middle of a silence deserted as a street before a crime."

These posts are chock full of reader comments. In the interest of creating a similar readership base, and in deference to the blog’s author (who has a damn decent idea) and in emulation of my father-as-innovator, I propose to take an actual footnote from a real work and offer it up for discussion. It is my hope that, severed from its original context and recontextualized in our present sphere, the footnote will take on an richness heretofore undiscovered. I’m dealing very much here in found poetry.

I offer up one of editor Gwin J. Kolb’s footnotes from the Yale edition of Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas. The following is footnote 5 of page 62 (Book XV of Rass.):

"See p. 36, n. 4, above."

Feel free to post your wonder and admiration below. More importantly, tell me how you connected on a deeply personal level with this line.