For most of my 20s, I couldn’t brush my teeth, ride public transit, or take a walk without listening to a podcast or audiobook. Silence, I thought, was a waste of time.

But since reading All the Beauty in the World (2023), I’ve been reconsidering my relationship to dull, seemingly empty moments. In the book, Patrick Bringley recounts his decade among the watchful guards of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Standing in the Met’s echoic halls for hours on end, day after predictable day, he found that, over time, his relationship to the work slowly changed. Initial enchantment with the art gave way to boredom – and then, enlightenment. He surrendered to the ‘turtleish movement of a watchman’s time’, stopped thinking about how much of his shift was left, and let the hours drift.

I think about Bringley’s experience when I have to engage in any long, monotonous task. It might be waiting in line or on hold, vacuuming, folding laundry, or chopping vegetables for dinner. I resist the urge to fill the time with music or podcasts and strive instead for what Bringley calls a ‘princely detachment’ from time, finding the luxury and nuance in the moment.

Bringley noticed patterns in the different kinds of Met visitors. Hanging up my laundry, I notice patterns in how different articles of clothing tend to wrinkle in the wash. Bringley developed an appreciation for artworks that he initially ignored. I pay finer attention to the unique composition of facial features on the faces of people I stand in line with. I am learning, I think, to appreciate the little things.

Of course, it requires constant practice to find the peace and richness in these stretches of time. But your reward comes, Bringley says, when an hour no longer feels an hour long, and you ‘hardly remember how to be bored’.

As you read, do you scribble around the edges? Over the years, writers have sworn by the practice. Edgar Allan Poe once wrote: ‘In getting my books, I have been always solicitous of an ample margin … for the facility it affords me of pencilling suggested thoughts, agreements and differences of opinion …’

I tend to make notes digitally nowadays. And if I include magazines and newspapers, most of my reading is online, where I probably could annotate with the right software, but can hardly doodle. That’s a shame. Apart from the fact that annotating boosts recall, we’d lose something if freeform margin-writing faded away. One of the meanings of ‘marginalia’ is ‘non-essential’, yet it’s anything but.

For one thing, scribbled-upon books have helped reveal the web of influences between writers and thinkers. Herman Melville’s annotated copy of John Milton’s Paradise Lost shows how it fed into Moby-Dick. And Charles Darwin’s comments in his books – from Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology to his grandfather Erasmus Darwin’s The Temple of Nature – inform how they shaped his theory.

Marginalia can reveal everyday insights too. Historians occasionally find scrawls in manuscripts that speak of long-dead readers’ lives. A recent exhibition in Dublin features scriptures doodled on by medieval Irish monks. One described feeling ‘ale-killed’ (hungover); another complained about his materials (‘New parchment, bad ink. O I say nothing more’). Turns out nuns did similar. In 2022, researchers found surprisingly modern cartoons of people around the edges of an 8th-century Act of Apostles. A nun etched them, perhaps mischievously.

Reading about these examples made me think I should annotate more – not everything, but the writing I care about. Or perhaps I’ll take a leaf from a wholesome TikTok trend I discovered while writing this: gifting an annotated book. This 21st-century practice suggests digitalisation may not be annotation’s death knell after all. Poe might have approved.