Every month we offer you an excerpt from a book that you yourself would like to read. This time a fragment from the collection of essays by Alexander Baunov «The Myth is Small». A must read.
“Fingers reach for the pen, pen for paper — but neither one nor the other is gone. The state of Indiana in the American North was the first to abolish compulsory pen-and-paper education. But not by a single state, it’s a disaster — open the gates, others will catch up — states, republics, empires. America is not a country that waits for instructions: what is not forbidden is allowed. The newest university study has already found schools in Tennessee without a letter. In 2006, in Florida, seeing that writing was somehow disappearing from schools by itself, they sent out instructions according to which in the third grade handwriting should begin, in the fourth — teachers should achieve legible handwriting, in the fifth — the student should write fluently. .
- How to write a good text? 5 theses of Tatyana Tolstaya
Since writing is directly related to scratching, that is, drawing, marginal drawings will also disappear. Charming female heads and the best self-portrait of Pushkin, where, “leaning on something on granite, Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin himself stands with Monsieur Onegin”, as well as the mountain peaks of Lermontov. My school notebooks, painted on the back with heavy metal guitarists, band names and aliens, is a dying genre. Ave, Caesar, morituri alienes te salutant. Our usual handwriting will become unreadable for the average person, just as we can almost no longer read the German books of the XNUMXth century typed in Gothic type, and, even more so, Gothic cursive. But this is how people wrote one and a half hundred and less years ago. A German may not read his great-grandmother’s postcard. Mein liber Augustin, Herzliche Glukvunschen, it used to be that blue punch burned in glasses. And now who drinks it, punch?
- Write a letter to yourself
The art of coherent writing by hand will move into the section of calligraphy, fine writing, just as the art of writing in statute, semi-statute and Carolingian minuscule is now. A handwritten signature will be replaced by an electronic one: an individual and unique set of ones and zeros.
What else? Drafts. If someone has been shocked by the manuscripts and preserved the archives, then the literary decoration and the author’s mental work are visible in them. What first came into his mind, but what he replaced it with, but how many times he changed it, whether his hand trembled or not, and whether he shed a burning tear or, for example, tea. Now what are the drafts? Here I am now, in this phrase I made a mistake, corrected myself, erased the word, replaced it, but no one will ever know what and for what. Well, okay with me, but they won’t recognize Pelevin either. And if you spill tea while writing, the hard drive will short-circuit so much that there are no drafts or clean copies at all. And only IOUs will remain from the great writers of the future. <...>
- In the wake of one publication
The letters were invented by the head for the hand. More precisely, to display linear two-dimensional characters on a flat background. Therefore, our writing is two-dimensional and black and white. But if we write not by hand, but indirectly, using the keyboard, the letters do not have to be as they are — simple and monotonous. Pressing a key is equally easy — even if the computer displays a three-dimensional yellow chrysanthemum with a hundred petals in response to it. <...>
I myself have not written with a pen on paper for a long time, I only put signatures and make notes on the margins of books (with a pencil). But if so, I can. And people who at a tender age avoided ink, blotting paper, pen, paper, somewhere, somehow, sometime in some unthinkable situation, will find themselves without their (or someone else’s) laptop, iPad, iPhone or just a keyboard — will they cope? Will they be able to express all their sadness and sorrow in a written word? Or just sound? Brilliant lines came to mind or something needs to be remembered — the battery has run out and the plugs have flown out. In general, I am concerned about the future of literature and the information security of mankind. Perhaps in vain.”