Recently I resurrected a fountain pen that came as a gift long back. Under the onslaught of speed and convenience fountain pens came close to getting extinct. Resuming some writing with the ink-pen (as the fountain pen is called), I noticed that legible writing with one is much more arduous than doing so with a ball point pen. This led my thoughts astray for a while and a hitherto unthought-of landscape unfolded in my mind-space.
I wondered just how much patience and care the previous generations must have taken in writing on papyrus or hand made paper- all the sacred texts have been rendered into writing thus, after all. They wrote with quills or twigs, far more difficult to handle, than a fountain pen.
They wrote not to be done with whatever they were writing but to preserve a record of some of their most important contemplations for posterity. The handwriting, most of it, was uniform, as if printed. Yet it must have been a labor of love to sit down and write beautifully as they did; here is why.
It is amazing to imagine as to what those people must have had to do just so that they could sit down to write- getting the supplies for writing must have been a long drawn process in itself- the making of ink, of the type that would not fade easily ( and most of it did not, for millennia), from locally available natural products, with the same being true for their paper.
Perhaps the hassle of just being able to get to the point of writing must have been so enormous that those people must have found it more convenient to memorize all that they deemed important!
And when it is such a hassle to write, you only write what is most important, all other transactions would have to be necessarily managed economically- by speech. Money thus, must have been a concept in the making in those times. If it were a high value transaction, with gold being very much around even then, that would have kept the wheels turning! Today you have the Internet and electronic banking saving paper though it is not as secure as the spoken word of the past!
One would be wonder struck in pondering about the ramifications of this need to save the writing for only the most important of topics. People would not have needed to write a best seller, they must have just narrated one wherever they went!
Not only this, whatever was worth documenting was stored, if not done either on stone or paper, then in memory- the options weren't many! Since rendering on paper or stone was not within every body's reach, it was memory that was trusted and it was trust that was then so important. You perhaps did not lie even to you enemies from the fear that records could get fudged, for memory and trust were all there was for evidence’s sake. The word of mouth had sanctity and power. With writing getting easier over time, that sanctity of the word of mouth was diluted.
It is perhaps pertinent to point out that with writing mostly absent from the scene there was also nothing to read. One might wonder as to how the common man or woman of that time in the past must have labored to kill time. Perhaps there was no time to kill because in the paradigm of that time, living was simply engaging fully with whatever that came in one’s life.
We tend to mix up absences of literacy and writing with absence of Wisdom and creativity. That certainly was not the case. With an abundance of spare time then available, there was a lot of meaningful engagement with everything and everyone. Hurry was not the same thing we experience today- perhaps one hurried in slots of days and not milliseconds as we do today- and so, connecting meaningfully was all there was to do once the chores were done with. This way of existence must have promoted the life instinct as well as health. In that way of life, Connecting here and now, in real terms, in real time, with so much all around, was all there was to do. What a magnificent idea of living a life!
It is incredible that so much sprung forth from the idea of restarting the use of an ink-pen; there is only one question, though. Should I write?
I wondered just how much patience and care the previous generations must have taken in writing on papyrus or hand made paper- all the sacred texts have been rendered into writing thus, after all. They wrote with quills or twigs, far more difficult to handle, than a fountain pen.
They wrote not to be done with whatever they were writing but to preserve a record of some of their most important contemplations for posterity. The handwriting, most of it, was uniform, as if printed. Yet it must have been a labor of love to sit down and write beautifully as they did; here is why.
It is amazing to imagine as to what those people must have had to do just so that they could sit down to write- getting the supplies for writing must have been a long drawn process in itself- the making of ink, of the type that would not fade easily ( and most of it did not, for millennia), from locally available natural products, with the same being true for their paper.
Perhaps the hassle of just being able to get to the point of writing must have been so enormous that those people must have found it more convenient to memorize all that they deemed important!
And when it is such a hassle to write, you only write what is most important, all other transactions would have to be necessarily managed economically- by speech. Money thus, must have been a concept in the making in those times. If it were a high value transaction, with gold being very much around even then, that would have kept the wheels turning! Today you have the Internet and electronic banking saving paper though it is not as secure as the spoken word of the past!
One would be wonder struck in pondering about the ramifications of this need to save the writing for only the most important of topics. People would not have needed to write a best seller, they must have just narrated one wherever they went!
Not only this, whatever was worth documenting was stored, if not done either on stone or paper, then in memory- the options weren't many! Since rendering on paper or stone was not within every body's reach, it was memory that was trusted and it was trust that was then so important. You perhaps did not lie even to you enemies from the fear that records could get fudged, for memory and trust were all there was for evidence’s sake. The word of mouth had sanctity and power. With writing getting easier over time, that sanctity of the word of mouth was diluted.
It is perhaps pertinent to point out that with writing mostly absent from the scene there was also nothing to read. One might wonder as to how the common man or woman of that time in the past must have labored to kill time. Perhaps there was no time to kill because in the paradigm of that time, living was simply engaging fully with whatever that came in one’s life.
We tend to mix up absences of literacy and writing with absence of Wisdom and creativity. That certainly was not the case. With an abundance of spare time then available, there was a lot of meaningful engagement with everything and everyone. Hurry was not the same thing we experience today- perhaps one hurried in slots of days and not milliseconds as we do today- and so, connecting meaningfully was all there was to do once the chores were done with. This way of existence must have promoted the life instinct as well as health. In that way of life, Connecting here and now, in real terms, in real time, with so much all around, was all there was to do. What a magnificent idea of living a life!
It is incredible that so much sprung forth from the idea of restarting the use of an ink-pen; there is only one question, though. Should I write?
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