The Letter Ledger, to keep track of paper correspondence. Of which there is not enough.
“I write in longhand. My Baltimore neighbor Anne Tyler and I are maybe the only two writers left who actually write with a fountain pen. She made the remark that there’s something about the muscular movement of putting down script on the paper that gets her imagination back in the track where it was. I feel that too, very much so. My sentences in print, as in conversation, tend to go on a while before they stop: I trace that to the cursiveness of the pen. The idea of typing out first drafts, where each letter is physically separated by a little space from the next letter, I find a paralyzing notion. Good old script, which connects this letter to that, and this line to that—well, that’s how good plots work, right? When this loops around and connects to that …”
I’m going to start chronicling mentions of writing longhand. I fear it’s a dying art.
Jack Kerouac’s journal.
Handwriting slowly became a form of self-expression when it ceased to be the primary mode of written communication. When a new writing technology develops, we tend to romanticize the older one. The supplanted technology is vaunted as more authentic because it is no longer ubiquitous or official. Thus for monks, print was capricious and script reliable. So too today: Conventional wisdom holds that computers are devoid of emotion and personality, and handwriting is the province of intimacy, originality and authenticity.
I always took great pride in my handwriting, even many years before I started using a computer regularly. I still regularly write longhand in my journals and other offline writing. I don’t think everyone still has to write that way, or learn cursive, though. In fact, I kind of like the idea of it becoming a more esoteric art form.
