A new sheet of stationery: freshness. A clean desk. An expectant fountain pen. Pop — off goes the cap. Poised in the air, hand and pen draw near to the paper: then contact. Flow and intimacy. The mind pours itself out in suggestive rhythmic streams. All is music.

What makes handwriting so special? Many people will agree that letters and Christmas cards are best written by hand; usually words like ‘personal’ and ‘authentic’ are used to describe the effect. On the other hand, it is slower, messier, and apparently unnecessary. Those wishing to preserve the practice of handwriting cannot simply insist on tradition and taste and authenticity. It is necessary to think more deeply about this widely felt appeal.

A first observation would be that writing by hand avoids the problem of distractions which besets devices. This is true, although I wouldn’t underestimate the power of a good pen to trap unsuspecting writers in quarter-hour doodling sprees. Granted, there is a certain purity and safety in the medium of writing. But if this were the important point, a typewriter would do just as well, free as it is of digital distractions. We have not gotten to the heart of the matter.

Maybe, then, the appeal of handwriting lies in in its slower pace, which is half or even one third of the speed of most typists. Here I think we are onto something. The expression evoked is ‘Think before you speak’, as well as the satisfaction of putting it into practice, of considering a thought carefully before voicing it out clearly and concisely, rather than succumbing to verbal ping-pong with an interlocutor. Handwriting encourages the former at least partly because of its slowness. ‘Hang on’, it asks, ‘take your time: are you sure that’s what you want to say?’ Especially if you want to be consistently legible, it leaves you no choice but to be deliberate and intentional in expression.

In the track-and field of handwriting, the pen is very clearly an inferior runner to the mind, unable to match its pace. I think the race ought to be rigged that way, for when thoughts are communicated at the same pace as they are generated, the result is easily disorganized, unwieldy, and giving a mild impression that the writer is just stringing words together.

Then again, would a slow typewriter do the job equally well? No: it is not just slowness which lends itself to clarity and concision. It is the absence of a backspace key! Although pencil can be erased and even ink can be scratched out, nothing compares to the brute force of the backspace key. We students know very well what it’s like when writing an essay to type out a sentence and then to delete and retype it in quick succession about six times until it looks half right. It feels like playing Battleships, and the effect on our writing style is not a good one. With pen, the stakes are higher: you might get away with a few corrections, but you know that the more changes you make, the more unseemly the page becomes.

The difference between stage acting and film acting is  a useful comparison: the stage, like the pen and the paper, is a performance space—the real thing—where mistakes are costly. The film set and the Word document, on the other hand,  are   spaces   of   perpetual   rehearsal   with   endless possibilities for modification and redoing, where the present tense is always subordinated to the future and its revisionary power. So then, we write better than we type not only because we take our time, but because we dare to act with a bit more permanence and decision.

At this point one might suggest taking my slow typewriter and removing its ability to edit or start a new page. That would certainly come much closer to handwriting, but  it would still be essentially different. For now we come to the physical act of handwriting. When I write a sentence, the shape of each individual letter and the amount of spacing between each word is unique and irreproducible. Not only is it unique when compared to someone else’s handwriting; it is unique every time I myself write it. I might write “felix culpa” fifty times on a sheet of paper and communicate the same thing each time (though one might argue that the very style of the handwriting affects the reader’s interpretation of the phrase).

But though I have written it fifty times, each individual instance of “felix culpa” is uniquely different from the others. I have written it fifty times in fifty different ways, even if the variations are only slight. Typing, because it is mediated by a machine, produces identical results whenever the inputs are the same, akin to arranging Lego blocks in a certain order for which there are a finite number of possibilities. Writing is more like a drawing a portrait, which literally has an infinite number of potential variations, and far greater potential for expressiveness.

It makes sense that we should like uniqueness: it is a very human thing. Each of us is a unique and unrepeatable instance of the genus “human”, a fact central to our concept of personhood. So when we look at a handwritten page, we are not looking at a sequence or an output, but at a creation, or, to go back to an analogy, a performance—just as every Moonlight Sonata played by a pianist is never the same as the former. In this way the handwritten page demands both the attention and appreciation we accord to a performance as well as the wonder and response we accord to a human being. And indeed many people say that when they read a letter or a card, they feel as though the author is there in the room speaking to them.

These things, then, constitute the special merit of handwriting. Slow and deliberate, it is a fruitful servant to the mind; unfriendly to revision, it elicits  greater  thought from the writer; and most importantly, being unique and irreproducible, it carries the personhood of its author in the very ink of its letters.

But there is more to say. I have spoken of handwriting as a performance: this thought can be expanded. We can describe the action that is handwriting, but more importantly we should address the Act of handwriting. The poetical perspective is no less intellectual than the scientific, and in any case handwriting has been so bound up with prose and verse for most of its history that it would be strange to avoid that mode of thought when discussing it.

In the act of writing, the writer enters into a solemn relationship with the pen. He has purchased its life; embraced it in his hand; lifted it up from its slumber in a  desolate drawer and granted it its deepest  yearning.  Equally,  the writer is priest, joining the ink and the paper in an insoluble union, and declaring it good. The writer is certainly a little Creator, and he delights in the creation on the page; but sometimes he delights in the pen itself, for it seems to take him by surprise each time just how well it writes. As creator, the writer makes sentences in his own image, and whoever reads a letter sees the face and hears the voice of its writer. The paper itself becomes a kind of creator, finding ever-new ways to speak to each reader and even to the author himself. The creation lives a life of its own.

I believe that imagery and awareness of this kind, as envisioned by each individual writer, is lifegiving to our appreciation of handwriting. This is not to say that all writing tasks should be handwritten rather than typed. Typed essay examinations may well be a justified innovation. It is rather the tyranny of the keyboard which poses the gravest danger: the enchainment to the machine at the cost of the extinction of the quill.

For the pen to thrive, it must be reiterated that the whole drama of pen and paper is staged in the mystery of handwriting. As with all meaningful rituals, we are not watchers nor even doers, but participants in a whimsical theatre. Any proper valuation of handwriting must therefore address both its inherent benefits and its poetic dimension.

When all is done, you put the pen down, and you look with satisfaction upon the work done. The pen lies exhausted on the desk, but, I am sure of it, with a smile and the peace that comes with the knowledge of having accomplished one’s purpose. You pick it up again, more gently this time, and say to it, “Well done, good and faithful servant: you have worked well. Now go and return to the slumber from which you came, and take your rest.” And so it shall do until that hour when it will be called forth and rise again to new and radiant thoughts.

Andrei Lambert

our petit philosophe