The Useless Art of Underlining for the Joy of Reading

I walk into a second-hand bookshop and leaf through a volume flooded with neon greens and pinks. Thick lines highlight key concepts, arrows point to definitions, brackets corral entire paragraphs like hostages. The previous reader did not leave an intimate trace, they left a productivity map: this is useful, this is not, this can be quoted tomorrow on Twitter, that can embellish a slide deck. I close the book and reflect that a fluorescent marker can be as aggressive as a corporate stamp, that even reading has become another branch of the performance industry.

The app that counts steps has found its mirror in the app that counts pages. It is no accident: we live convinced that everything must be measured, even distraction. We are offered the challenge of fifty novels a year, the goal of a thousand pages a month, the medal that rewards the “disciplined” reader. The accelerated pace of consumption disguises itself as high-performance culture and, in the process, the quiet of encountering a book becomes contaminated with anxiety. The text turns into a trophy, the experience into a checklist.

Yet there is a subversive gesture within anyone’s reach: underlining without purpose. It is not about banishing the pencil but reclaiming it for an almost superstitious use. A stroke that is not meant to be cited in a meeting, an underline that does not pursue the synthesis of an idea but the vibration of a moment. That improvised mark is the scar of slow reading. It exists not to recall a theory but to remember that I was alive on that page. It does not aim to save time but to spend it.

We would do well to remember that for centuries reading was as scattered as it was introspective. Medieval monks scribbled the margins with glosses that were questions, exclamations or private jokes. No one expected to convert those notes into slide decks. The margin was a space for personal dialogue, not a repository of metrics. When the printing press popularized the book, readers kept leaving idiosyncratic marks: dog-eared corners, crossed-out words, wine stains. Paper accepted the blemish as part of its fate. Today the screen promises immaculate purity and erases the trace of the body that reads.

Productivity has even colonized bookshops. There are labels like “high-impact reads,” “books that multiply your efficiency,” “essays that boost your leadership.” Shelves look like a mental gym where each volume promises cognitive muscles. The metaphor is tempting, but the result is a culture that glorifies speed and punishes stillness. Reading becomes equivalent to running on a treadmill: measured in word kilometers, in quote calories.

But there is a clandestine pleasure in slowness. It lies in lingering over a sentence, allowing an adverb to thicken in memory like syrup. This does not produce a clever tweet or a useful statistic for a report, but it yields something more valuable: a tremor. That tremor confirms that literature does not submit to the logic of immediate use. One reads not to win but to get lost, and in that lostness one learns what cannot fit into a bar graph.

I keep old notebooks full of useless underlines. Next to each line there is no explanation, only an echo that forces me to accept the fragility of my memory. I revisit them and discover that context has evaporated. Why did I highlight that adjective? Why did I circle that metaphor? The enigma is part of the testimony. It proves that in that moment no metric governed my gesture. There is no productivity to rescue, only a frozen spark.

Corporate rhetoric will say that even leisure feeds creativity, that every free moment is an investment, that rest is an innovation strategy. Thus it recruits pause and puts it to work. Against that appropriation, I underline uselessness as a value in itself. Being productively useless means holding a verse between my lips without writing it down, letting an image churn my imagination without searching for practical application. Defending uselessness means defending opacity, the uncharted zone of experience that escapes the algorithm’s scanner.

Some fear this stance leads to ignorance or elitism. In reality, it leads to complexity. Reading without a goal does not mean reading without rigor; it means accepting that rigor is not measured in quantifiable results. It means renouncing the illusion that the text must render accounts. When reading ceases to be profitable it turns into a laboratory where consciousness expands without a supervisor, a space where ambiguity becomes fertile.

Perhaps that is why a book heavily underlined in arbitrary ways possesses a special aura. When one lands in my hands I feel heir to a secret. Every crooked line is a wink crossing years and geographies. Less forgiving readers protest: “This ruins the purity of the copy.” I reply that the purity of a book is not in the virginity of its paper but in its capacity to host traces. An untouched volume may be elegant, but a scarred one is an archive of lives.

I therefore invite all readers to practice the revolt of useless underlining. Let us use color to confuse, not to organize. Let us slash sentences we do not understand, paint words we may never recall. Let us make the book a territory that resists search-engine logic. When another reader discovers these senseless signals they may wonder who was the lunatic highlighting irrelevant adverbs. They may recognize complicity. They may not care at all. All options are valid, because the heart of reading does not beat to the rhythm of productivity but to the lively disorder of experience.

The next time you open a book and feel the urge to measure your progress, remember that every page can be a blind alley and that is fine. Remember that a useless underline is a way to say I was here even if no one ever knows. And when you close the volume without having gained a single usable fact you can smile, because in that waste of time

you have recovered something algorithms will never value: the freedom to read for the pure pleasure of getting lost.