A funny thing happened at a Flatiron cafe
The other morning I was sitting in a cafe in the Flatiron neighborhood of Manhattan, waiting for a bookstore to open. Since I had more than an hour, I thought I’d get started on the next chapter of the third part of the Spy, Interrupted trilogy. I had been dragging my feet for days and distracting myself with various computer trivia instead of writing. I took out my black ink pen and fished around inside my bag for my notebook. Alas, I had left it at home. But I had three sheets of reviewers’ comments on a technical paper I had coauthored, printed only on one side, leaving three beautiful blank sheets for me to write on. Once I started, the words flowed and I began to fill up the page with sentence after sentence arranged in tightly spaced lines to pack in as much as I could into those three sheets.
I had reached the end of the first sheet and was about to move on to the next one when I heard a voice. The young man at the next table was saying something. I looked up at him.
“May I take a picture of you writing?” he asked.
I must’ve looked puzzled because he continued. “It is so beautiful, that letter covered with flowing handwriting. I wanted to take a picture–it is rare to see that these days. I am afraid that it will die out.”
He took the picture and we had a nice conversation before we parted. And then just today I saw this article: David Sax’s paean to Moleskine notebooks in The New Yorker about how tech startups are going bananas over the simplicity and efficiency of notebooks and handwritten notes.
For me, the physical process of writing gives great pleasure, particularly when a silky smooth sheet of white paper meets an ink pen that flows easily and evenly. The brain seems to respond better when it sees the writing take shape on paper…not impersonal characters on a eerie glowing screen but shapes and forms that have evolved with me from my childhood, with idiosyncratic flourishes and irrational curlicues that are as unique to me as my fingerprints, symbols that are physical manifestation of what’s inside my head.
The art of writing by hand is aesthetically fulfilling and creative in its own right. Calligraphy was a high art form in many cultures. While I make no claims to calligraphy or even a particularly beautiful handwriting, I am happy to be on the leading edge of an analog revolution–bring back the notebooks!
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