For the previous two years, in the course of the twilight of my tutorial profession, I’ve turn out to be a devotee of the fountain pen, typically pondering this seemingly retro act of placing pen to paper.
Composing once more by hand pressured me to confess how typically I succumb to the web’s unending temptations. Prior to now, a few of my finest prose has come forth at 40,000 ft, whereas I used to be strapped in for an extended flight—with no contact exterior the streaking metallic tube. However the wily digital satan by no means rests. Most jets now provide Wi-Fi, engaging you to test your e-mail or the Yankees–Pink Sox rating as you cross the North Atlantic.
My longing to write down by hand, although, was undermined by largely illegible penmanship, a lifelong consequence of my naturally lefty self having been pressured to write down right-handed. No pen ever appeared to work for me, and I have tried most. Gel pens are the worst, producing a script that even I can not decipher. Even so, throughout a analysis journey to Europe in fall 2022, the place Wi-Fi was typically unavailable, I discovered myself counting on a certain pocket book in the course of the day and my pc at evening. The illegibility of my notes and journal entries made typing them out particularly onerous and time-consuming, all of the extra so after I had returned residence two months later. Then I remembered a fountain pen that my mom had gifted me so way back—was it for my fiftieth birthday in 2005?—that its ink cartridges had dried up. A visit to Staples yielded a small pack, and I spotted instantly that there was sufficient friction between the nib and web page to gradual me down—sufficient for me to have the ability to decipher what I had written.
Like most brainstorms, this one proved ephemeral. To jot down by hand after which enter textual content into a pc—with my mediocre keyboarding abilities—was simply too burdensome. Those that began their tutorial journeys in the course of the typewriter period will keep in mind with a whiff of despair these late-night, hours-long classes spent typing the ultimate draft. Correction tape, erasable bond, Wite-Out—my coronary heart sinks simply itemizing these important instruments from one other period. If you would like a style of these occasions, simply pattern the acknowledgments in tutorial books or dissertations from the a long time earlier than computer systems, wherein girls, sometimes wives, are thanked for having typed the manuscript. The acknowledgements from Sacvan Bercovitch’s The American Jeremiad, which I simply pulled from a shelf, mirror extra rarefied tutorial circumstances, because the creator notes the grant supplied by the English Division at Columbia College “for the typing of the manuscript.”
After which a lightweight went off as I sat in my examine, one which has modified my life as a author. After fighting incipient carpal tunnel syndrome a number of years in the past, I bought voice recognition software program. Dragon Naturally Talking was highly effective, particularly in the event you spoke in full phrases and sentences. My copy of the software program is now previous—it won’t work with Home windows 11—however proved a godsend with surprising advantages. Whereas dictating my pocket book pages, I might hear the awkward sentences; I might conjure the higher phrase on the spot, and I might detect these locations the place the tone wanted adjusting. Typically inspiration would bless me and a brand new sentence or two would emerge like Athena.
I’m no neo-Luddite longing to smash all computer systems, even when Home windows or MS Phrase betray me, as they so typically do. I acknowledge the realities and advantages of our digital age. However wielding a fountain pen these previous two years has prompted me to wonder if some challenges the humanities face concerning writing and studying is likely to be overcome by heeding the pen’s easy classes.
The Significance of Contact
For millennia the act of writing has been tactile. From Babylonian cuneiform on clay tablets to elaborate Medieval script on vellum and fashionable calligraphy on heavyweight marriage ceremony stationery, writing has all the time meant touching the floor, with phrases being bodily imprinted because the pen journeys throughout. After I write properly, my arms seldom depart the web page. And once I cease to contemplate the suitable phrase or a extra felicitous phrase, my pen typically poises a mere quarter inch above, able to strike.
Examine this to composing on a laptop computer, the place pauses can result in catastrophe. Distractions fill your visual view—apps, job bars, climate forecasts and seemingly unending notifications that one other e-mail has arrived or one other appointment looms. While you grasp for the suitable mixture of phrases, it’s all too straightforward to hunt them past the display screen, or, even worse, to succumb to this system suggesting what it believes ought to come subsequent. And until you’re vigilant about shutting off countless options, the software program will insist upon indicating that you simply simply misspelled a phrase or used a questionable grammatical development. Most of us then dutifully right the “mistake,” solely to lose the rhythm and even essence of our prose. An increasing number of, the digital web page appears to be doing the writing.
The Worth of Tangibility
We now have all had the expertise of composing and revising a doc on a pc solely to lose the trouble due to a crash, a software program freeze or a second of forgetfulness wherein we clicked “no” as a substitute of “sure.” What may need appeared so actual to us for an hour or extra vanishes like a genie who returns to his bottle with out granting our want.
After I compose by hand, my efforts are proper in entrance of me. The crossed-out phrase—which seems to be the suitable one—can nonetheless be recovered. The historical past of shifting paragraphs, these arrows and circles that typically fill the web page, will not be misplaced as they’d be in pc drafting. Much more satisfyingly tangible for me, nonetheless, is the bodily proof of my labors: the blue ink stains on my proper hand, the ritual of refilling my pen from the bottle when I’ve gushed out a pool of phrases, the celebratory event once I empty a bottle of ink and must open a brand new one. An analogous temper of celebration arises once I fill the final web page of my wide-ruled pocket book and place it on the shelf subsequent to its predecessors. Scrolling by means of 1000’s of paperwork and folders on my pc is actually a humbling expertise, as they symbolize the literal steps in a multidecade tutorial journey, however I remorse not having discovered my fountain pen area of interest a few years earlier than. What a set these notebooks would’ve been.
The Pleasures of Portability
Coinciding with my return to compositional roots has been my common presence at a spot the place my phrases appear to movement so simply, the Corridor Avenue Bakery in Grand Rapids. Throughout my sabbatical, I used to be there at the least 5 days every week and now proceed to indicate up on nonteaching days. All I would like is my pocket book, a folder with concepts or drafts, a full pen and my common—a big home espresso and a cranberry-almond scone—to set me up for a stable hour of writing. Conversations bubble from close by tables, youngsters run round hopped up on sugar, drivers retrieve DoorDash orders—all set in opposition to the occasional counterpoint of the hissing espresso machine—and I’m in my aspect. No want for Wi-Fi passwords or the elusive desk subsequent to {an electrical} outlet. I can stroll throughout the room to talk with somebody, order a refill, go to the lads’s room—all with out fearing that my laptop computer will disappear. And spilling espresso on my pocket book or dropping it onto the ground is a minor inconvenience, not an costly technological disaster. Touring gentle, I can sweep up my possessions right away and head out the door.
The Relevance to Studying
In serious about writing as a bodily act that produces one thing you’ll be able to maintain, I acknowledged anew how related these identical qualities are to studying. We appear right now to be awash in phrases, but paradoxically discover ourselves within the midst of a studying disaster that extends from the youngest learners to these at America’s universities.
An article by Rose Horowitch in The Atlantic, “The Elite Faculty College students Who Can’t Learn Books,” satisfied me that my expertise with the fountain pen is likely to be related to the challenges she describes.
Horowitch experiences that college students at elite schools, who’ve already confirmed their capacity to learn advanced texts, appear much less and fewer ready (or prepared) to learn lengthy literary works. She largely ascribes this to excessive faculties emphasizing standardized exams, to teenagers distracted by smartphones and to varsity college students who view their educations in strictly transactional phrases, as means to particular, typically exceedingly particular, ends—which seldom embody pushing by means of Middlemarch.
She could also be proper, however the academics and school she interviewed provide little past assigning shorter texts: Kate Chopin’s The Awakening as a substitute of Jane Austen’s Pleasure and Prejudice. Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye as a substitute of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. A e book or two at most from The Iliad or Paradise Misplaced.
Let me argue, although, that the very components I affiliate with composing by hand—its tactile and tangible nature, its easy conveniences—needs to be drawn upon when encountering lengthy, advanced and typically life-changing texts. And that the cool distance of the digital interface works in opposition to these very qualities.
Sure, I do know it’s potential to place all of your books on a single system the place you’ll be able to search and annotate the texts. Even in the event you lose your Kindle, your digital library may be retrieved from the cloud. But the expertise of studying on the display screen tends to flatten all writing, making every display screen very similar to every other, in order that the distinctive really feel and heft of Moby-Dick, for instance, is misplaced, making Melville’s incandescent prose indistinguishable from any Substacker’s, and possibly much less visually engaging.
Even in the event you can resist distraction in your laptop computer, you by no means get the sensory expertise distinctive to every e book: the way it feels in your arms, how its web page design pulls you in or pushes you away, how its very odor when brand-new or a long time previous can evoke its distinctive qualities, how the satisfying sound of turning pages reaches a crescendo if you get to the tip and shut the duvet with a resonant thump. Just like the indignant slam of a phone receiver, it’s a sound past our digital age. And all of it results in a ultimate second if you place the e book on a shelf to face as a tangible reminder of your ever-changing studying life—no web connection required.
The bodily e book, that container that our society, attempt as it’d, can not forged into the digital darkness, will dwell on. At the least I hope so. A latest go to to my college’s lovely library leaves a lot room for doubt. Within the common Mary Idema Pew Library Studying and Data Commons—sorry, however that’s its official identify, sans commas—lots of of scholars collect at any given time. However to walk by means of its busy flooring quickly makes this e book lover really feel like Diogenes looking for an trustworthy man. My lamp has seldom shined upon a scholar with a bodily e book in hand; as a substitute, they faucet and scroll their method by means of studying assignments in a lot the identical method they interact each day life.
I see them as we share the bus that travels between our college’s two campuses, filling every second with the small screens they discover much more fascinating than the passing world—the season’s first snowflakes, the glow forged upon the street as nightfall approaches, the deer in a harvested cornfield who search for with extra curiosity than my fellow vacationers.
With a sigh—and nod to the deer—I open my copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, touching its acquainted pages with my ink-stained arms, and attempt to keep in mind to textual content my spouse that I’m on my method.
