(Some thoughts on the occasion of retiring a full journal and starting a new one)
My pen’s heft comforts me. Its smooth sleekness sends shivers of delight up and down my spine. I caress it gently, lovingly, enjoying the feel of it in my hands. Even when I’m not writing with it, I twiddle and twirl the magnificent silver writing instrument in my hand. This small object, a gift from my wife about four years ago, has become one of a very few precious possessions.
The simple joy of pen and ink
I write online. Obviously. Cyber-words on video monitors of all shapes and sizes continue their march on actual print: books, newspapers, magazines and notebooks, like the one in which I wrote the first draft of this brief essay. I’m not fighting it, but I’d like to mention a few ways pen and ink and paper excite me in ways that the bits and bytes I’m seeing on the screen right now just can’t.
Pen and paper show process. Glance through any of my journals. Read the notebooks and first drafts of published books and articles. On a real page a writer can make real corrections and real edits that he or she or anyone else can review. Or if not edits, a written journal or notebook will show you the progress of a person’s thinking, in what direction the idea or the essay or the novel is moving. While it is true that most if not all word processing programs allow you to see earlier versions of the document, it isn’t quite the same. Seeing a phrase crossed out or moved to another place on the page, or to see the written meanderings, the movement of a writer’s thoughts, gives the reader a front-row seat to what that writer was thinking and trying to express.
Pen and paper show personality. On a cyber page, everybody who writes something is reduced to using Times New Roman or Arial, or any of a large but finite set of fonts and type height. In my journal, you can read (most of the time) words written in my penmanship with all its quirks and oddities and uniqueness. It’s easier to imagine my family and friends who survive me after I’ve died being more deeply moved by reading something in my own handwriting rather than something I’ve typed or had published.
Pen and ink and paper are sensual. I really don’t mean anything sexual by that (though I suppose it wouldn’t take much, given a pen’s shape, to move in that direction). What I mean is that actual writing with a writing implement, especially a fine one like my Cross, engages feelings, stimulates a person’s senses. I’m not just plinking away on a cool, plastic keyboard watching the words appear on a distant screen. Rather, as I suggestively wrote in the first paragraph, I feel the pen’s smoothness, I sense the flow of ink from the tip onto the paper. With fountain pens, I may even (usually not happily) experience the actual wetness of ink. Paper, too, comes in a variety of textures, adding to the sensory experience. Quill pens, and older model fountain pens, even make a scratching noise, tattooing the progress of words being set down. The only sense writing doesn’t stimulate is taste, unless you eat a piece of birthday cake on which something has been written. If you’re the baker, you’d really be eating your words.
I think I am of one of the last generations to have completed my formal education using only a typewriter for papers and assignments. The first personal computers were just becoming available in my final, impoverished years of graduate school. Remembering all the pages upon pages and reams upon reams of papers I had to type, I am still grateful for the ease in editing words this computer allows. I like the ability I have to quickly and painlessly (penlessly?) lift a sentence from Part A and plop it down in Part B.
Given all this, I still do not ever want to be without real paper covered with real words printed or written with real ink. I will still buy a Sunday paper, relishing the scent and the feel of it (and washing the ink off my hands afterwards). I will continue to reach up with my hand to pull a book from a shelf to open and read it, smelling the booky smell and feeling that booky feel. And above all, I will not give up the smooth, sleek, pleasurable pen with which I scribble and note and write.
*or Everything you Wanted to Know about Pen and Ink But Were Afraid to Ask
