Write it out: the practice of long-hand

It would be remarkable to know how many of us write by hand anymore. With “writing by hand” I mean more than notes or grocery lists; I mean full sentences, paragraphs, complete letters, essays, and so forth. As everything old is new again, we read about people increasingly turning to hand-written notes, and even gathering together for sessions about writing long-hand. I doubt we possess accurate percentages of the quantity of these efforts; I think we would agree that it is very small.

Like most people, I am at the computer every day responding to emails or other messages I receive; I also share documents via Google docs. If this is not progress – I will argue in a minute that it is not – it is commonplace.

But I am also an inveterate writer by hand. My personal and scholarly efforts – whether papers, articles, or books – take form as manuscripts in the original sense of the word: written by hand. Only afterwards do I make a typescript. As my wife can attest, I am selective – she would use another word – about paper, notebooks, pens, and pencils. It has taken time to find the right métier for my writing practice.

I realize you are likely reading this essay in a digital version and I appreciate the irony about talking about hand-writing in this format. Needs must. But the medium is not the message all the time. A theme on Humanities Watch has been the importance of writing by hand. It has noted studies that demonstrate the ways hand-writing enhances learning, and cited warnings about machine writing effaces personality. We practice, as children, writing out our letters. This practice is not simply to convey information, but also, more fundamentally, to train our minds and develop our mental circuitry.

It is worth considering a healing dimension as well. Master Zhou, my qi gong teacher, has emphasized that what we do with the smallest part of the body affects the largest; so finger and wrist exercises, such as those naturally practiced in writing, convey benefits on a broader range of body, mind and spirit. No wonder, then, is calligraphy considered one of the Five Excellences in Chinese culture, alongside medicine, internal martial arts, painting, and poetry. When we write by hand we make circular motions with our wrist, and these motions distribute qi.

During our Covidian isolation, hand-writing has taken on another dimension of meaning, one that draws upon its roots in monastic practices. We have lived increasingly apart, often in isolation. Although screens on computers, tablets, and phones have provided us ways to converse and collaborate, I have experienced, like many others, canceled conferences and professional meetings. We no longer meet face-to-face, but at a digital distance. But this void also provided a space to experiment with hand-writing. Not just writing notes and essays, but also copying texts by hand opened up new ways of looking at work and life.

One meeting, which two colleagues and I originally planned for May 2020, had to be delayed. We imagined we might meet ten months later but could only do so virtually. I was preparing a talk on favorite poems and letters of Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374). I had designed the paper and selected my sources in December 2019, and soon discovered I would be facing an eighteenth-month delay.

I took to writing out the poems, stanza by stanza, every day over a period of months. The verses are in Italian, and the writing slowed my attention to sound out syllables. When reading aloud the meter of Petrarch’s canzone, “Di pensier in pensier, di monte in monte” (From thought to thought, mountain to mountain), I could easily notice its similarity to other canzoni. The images of shadow and light appeared more clearly, from his phrase ombrosa valle (shadowed valley) in line 5 to “Ove porge ombra un pino alto” (where a tall pine casts shade, line 27) and then resounding in the allusive “tanto più bella il mio pensier l’adombra” (my thought casts her as so much more beautiful, line 48) and then on to the final stanza, where the poet writes “Ove d’altra montagna ombra non tocchi” (where from another mountain the shadow does not touch, line 53).

Beyond the imagery, and its unfolding meaning of concealment and revelation, I could hear long vowels in these lines, especially the long o’s repeated elsewhere, for example cascading into the lines further down in the final stanza:

            Indi i miei danni a misurar con gli occhi
            comincio, e ‘intanto lagrimando sfogo
            di dolorosa nebbio il cor condense… (lines 56-58).  

            (Then I begin to measure my losses with my eyes, and while weeping I unburden my heart of the mournful cloud gathered there…)

The enjambed comincio drew my attention to the way Petrarch often begins again toward the end, in cyclical fashion, and the gerund lagrimando opened my eyes to the multiple, careful use of gerunds throughout the poem, reinforcing the continual, repetitive movement.

In the second stanza, the poet writes

            A ciascun passo nasce un penser novo
            de la mia donna (lines 17-18)

            (With every step a new thought of my lady is born)

And these variations on a theme, as he moves and thinks, finds an echo in an internal dialogue a few lines later, which concludes,

            et in questa trapasso sospirando (line 25)

            (And I step to this thought, sighing)

The physical step falls as the mental, emotional transition, passo…trapasso, leading the poet to sigh aloud, and vocalize his inner questions with rounded notes:

            Or porebbe esser vero? or come? or quando? (line 26)

            (Now could this be true? but how? but when?)

I pursued the same practice when reading Petrarch’s letters. Writing out a letter he sent to his friend, Francesco Nelli, with the heading “On expanding the shortness of time and bringing to a standstill the fleetingness of life,” I came to see multiple senses he attributes to the Latin world finis. In the opening of the letter, it means the end of life:

          omnia que sub celo sunt, mox ut orta sunt, properant et ad finem suum mira velocitate rapiuntur.

          (Everything under heaven, from the moment of its birth, hurries on and is taken to its end with amazing speed.)

          Non eodem calle sed iisdem passibus gradimur, diversis tramitibus omnes unum petimus finem.

          (We advance not by the same road but with the same steps, by diverse paths we all travel to a common end.)

In the first sentence, the phrase velocitate rapiuntur sounds out with hastening iambs the speed of movement to the end; in the second, the closing rhythm is trochaic, almost liturgical in its measured beats.

Yet finis takes on another meaning in the letter’s central section: it comes to convey the moral good or end, or fulfillment in virtue. Those who reach this end live the classical ideal of the vita peracta, the completed life, whereas those who chase fleeting pleasures “infinitum iter arripiunt. Horum vita non finitur sed abrumpitur….” (pursue an unending path. The lives of these do not finish but are cut short).

Petrarch, whose creative, restless mind knew no end – “I am,” he tells Nelli, “one of those who hold a middle position” (medium locum) – returns to the original meaning of finis at the close of the letter:

            Hac ne in finem circumveniar, aperire oculos incipio; satius est enim sero quam nunquam sapere.

            (And so that I am not led astray in moving to this end, I am beginning to open my eyes; it is better to reach wisdom late than never.)

At the letter’s concluding lines he comes back to where he started; and I find the circularity of his Italian verses in his Latin prose, when he begins (incipio, comincio) to look out on his path in the unshadowed evening of life.

All this appears part of a scholar’s pursuit: employing antiquarian practices – monastic hand-writing – to glean historical or literary insights. To what purpose? What do they tell us about who we are, and why, and now?

The Covid-crisis has brought about a slowing of pace, a rallentamento, that permits, persuades, moves us to attend to what we have habitually neglected, especially our inner lives. And this patience, forced upon us, can be brought to other areas of life.

So I copied out Robert Frost’s poem:

            I wonder about the trees.
            Why do we wish to bear
            Forever the noise of these
            More than another noise
            So close to our dwelling place?
            We suffer them by the day
            Till we lose all measure of pace,
            And fixity in our joys,
            And acquire a listening air.

These opening lines focus my attention on certain words: “wonder,” “dwelling” “suffer,” “pace,” “fixity,” “acquire a listening air.” The poet speaks ironically about how the noise of the trees disturbs him, as if his nature existed before theirs. They reverse his perspective on his life, upsetting his pace and fixity. And the close hearkens to his coming uprootedness:

            I shall set forth somewhere,
            I shall make the reckless choice
            Some day when they are in voice
            And tossing so as to scare
            The white clouds over them.
            I shall have less to say,
            But I shall be gone.

Does the “shall,” echoing in these lines, suggest an indicative or conditional voice, something that will happen or, in its protest, threatens to happen? Is he speaking to us, or to himself? Perhaps he will stay, but also be gone.

The writing by hand takes us back to the nature of things, to the origins of thinking through images, in the spirit of play. We too often face a world seemingly constrained by information, in the typescripts of everyday life. Hand-writing provides a meditative pause to trace a life more hidden, but no less real.