Markmaking
Pivoting off Philip Hensher's new book about handwriting, The Missing Ink, Philip Maugham ponders
the slowly disappearing practice of using pen and paper, noticing that
"we write everything from love letters to shopping lists as emails,
texts
or tweets" while also "clinging to a
romantic notion of the freedom that comes with the written word." He
describes our conflicted approach to the handwritten note this way:
[T]here is good reason, argues Philip Hensher, for such a
paradoxical evaluation of our handwritten style: "We have surrendered
our handwriting for something more mechanical, less distinctively human,
less telling about ourselves and less present in our moments of the
highest happiness and the deepest emotion," he writes, while
simultaneously recognising that "if someone we knew died, I think most
of us would still write our letters of condolences on paper, with a
pen." Hensher’s new book The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting (And Why it Still Matters),
rests on the argument that "ink runs in our veins, and tells the world
what we are like". Handwriting "registers our individuality, and the
mark which our culture has made on us. It has been seen as the unknowing
key to our souls and our innermost nature. It has been regarded as a
sign of our health as a society, of our intelligence, and as an object
of simplicity, grace, fantasy and beauty in its own right."
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