On forgetting your umbrella.

A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella, says James Joyce in Ulysses. Nietzsche, writes in his diary a somewhat alarmed "I've forgotten my umbrella!"

 Jacque Derrida highlights, if somewhat opaquely, the importance of not placing our umbrellas in the margins. 
"The umbrella is that which must not be forgotten. It is a note written in the margins."

 I write my 'to do' list in my diary, '.see Doctor, talk to Bank etc, in the margins I write 'umbrella' (I live in England). 

So I have noted that I must not forget my umbrella, yet I have placed it in the margins.

For Derrida because you have written the umbrella in the margins, you have already forgotten it. 

Yet the 'umbrella' was never  outside the text. It was written with the same ink, upon the same page as the rest. Yet we determine its legitimacy (the umbrella) based solely on spatial relations, on its location? And we are so quick to do so.

This is the way it is with margins. It is what has already been forgotten that we must remember, recognize as within the text, for it (the main body) too is an umbrella, just like that contained in the margin.

And I can't be plainer than that.


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