Stepping back from the digital.
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My last word:
“Books offer a tactile experience that screens simply cannot replicate.”
If you have never had a life with books as I have and only want text, then you might as well just print text from your computer and staple it.
Fair enough – for you.
But that’s not what I want.
I have thousands of books, my house and garage are both filled with books.
I adore my books and I read and reread many of them.
However I don’t feel the necessity to bang on about it all of tge time or the need to look down my nose or decry the choices of other people who prefer to use other forms of literature/media, or speak scornfully about people who don’t love books.
A friend’s explanation.
” … It [handwriting] is an art cultivated throughout the whole body, expressed through the finely tuned fingers; keyboarding is a skill, utilitarian but not aiming for beauty. It is probably more useful than penmanship for taking notes because it is speedier but it lacks specificity and individual expressiveness. All pages typed on the same keyboard will look the same, with varying serifs, perhaps.
I remember how proud I was at 4 when I learned to read, and a few months later, when I started printing my own words and stories. Cursive came later and I was prouder yet. Even though my writing has rambled far from the ideals of the Palmer method which I was taught, every deviation has been meaningfully designed, every curlicue and flourish. It belongs to me, not to a piece of storebought hardware. It is easily identifiable when an card from me arrives in the mail. Keyboarding is a lesser achievement.”They use to teach calligraphy and dictation, and we have to write using fountain pen. Curriculum vitae, and thesis had to be handwritten. At Calazans, Bosch, and La Salle schools the graduation gift was a fountain pen. I collect fountain pen, I am a Estilophile
Yes, I did, and there was an international club for hand written correspondence, and I met several peoples too, and some peoples fell in love that way too, and they got married. Handwriting is an art that is the main purpose of caligraphy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calligraphy
My two lifelong friends were made through correspondence. Handwritten correspondence, by its nature, encourages the cultivation of real relationships and the lengthy expression of thought and feeling. One can return to a letter and one has leisure in its composition.
Digital communication tends, on the contrary, toward speed and brevity; relations are more numerous and accordingly void of depth. It encourages, by its nature, impetuosity and literacy becomes unimportant.
I also like calligraphy, especially the medieval illuminated book. But I also think the ink bottle with stilus ought to be used unselfconsciously to write ordinarily, and not just for calligraphy.
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