A Pen
Item No. 17
“With a pen, we apply ink to the surface of paper to write. To write what? A letter to a friend, for example. ‘Letters mingle souls,’ wrote the poet Sir Henry Wooten.”A pen is a writing instrument that applies ink to a surface, typically paper. It is for drawing or writing. Pens have a few parts: the barrel, the tip, the ink reservoir, the cap. With a pen, we apply ink in order to write. To write what? A letter to a friend, for example. “Letters mingle souls,” wrote the poet Sir Henry Wooten underscoring the unique capacity for a letter to fortify friendships (On friendship see also C.S. Lewis The Four Loves). (See also catalog entry: Us). What else? Well, writers use pens and notebooks to scribble down notes and ideas. Author Gay Talese, as an example, wrote “Frank Sinatra has a Cold,” after scribbling down notes. He’s not the only one. Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Wolf, Thomas Jefferson, Joan Didion, Oliver Sacks, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Atwood, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison…Such writers kept notes about interesting things to remember that they’d write about later. Some of them kept diaries or journals (Consider the lost art of journals, (Sadly, some speculate that journals are also falling by the wayside now that we already have moment to moment documentations of our lives on social media. Perhaps keep an eye out for a journal as the next entry in The (Death of a) Thing: The Last Catalog). Also, with a pen we might practice our penmanship or our personal signature so as to sign our name. So as to leave our unique imprint on our work. By the way, pens come in many varieties. Fine point. Medium point. Thick point. And writing by hand with pen and paper activates the brain. There is empirical evidence that writing has psychological benefits. Even so, we tap, tap, tap on a keyboard (or screen). And we express ourselves in emojis. A single icon (See the future catalog entry for word).
If writing by hand improves memory and recall of words and fortifies the foundations of literacy and learning, it seems the roughly three pounds of our own human brain may have some at stake here in the costs. So that our brains really might pay the greatest price. That perhaps the ‘stylus to iPad’ or better yet, pen to paper, might serve surprising cognitive benefits given the “complexity of the process and how it forces different brain systems to work together.”
Grey matter aside, though, the biggest cost might just be that friend or family member that never receives our own unique and hand crafted signature at the end of a (love) letter.
So much for love.
(See catalog entry for Letter Writing.)
Other specifications:
The average pen is about 5 to 6 inches long, or 130 to 140 millimeters, which is roughly the size of an adult hand.