Intimate price of progress

Bill Keller, the one that heads the most advanced newspaper in the world of New York Times, who has mastered the latest information technique better than others, wrote a complaint about progress. Understanding his inevitability, Keller nevertheless reminds us of the price that we pay for intellectual comfort. Before Guttenberg, he writes, everyone had better memory that we gave to the printed book. With the advent of the calculator, we forgot how to count in the mind and multiply 10 by 10, poking in the buttons. Google selects erudition from us, devaluing encyclopedism, which previous eras are used to proud and boast. But that's not all. Superior the scientific and technical revolution and its prophet - a computer - intervene in the most intimate spheres of life, abolishing such, for example, a private part of a person, like a handwriting. The same New York Times, bitterly, said that the new generation of Americans, which had grown up with a computer keyboard, no longer knows how to read a handwritten font, especially to write.

Of all the losses listed by Bill Celler, it is the most difficult thing for me to come to terms with this. Why is the disappearance of such a seemingly trifle, like a handwriting? Of course, because he is unique as a fingerprint. But if in the latter case nature took care of the uniqueness of the drawing, then in the first - culture. Learning to write, we become different, for the letter, like a gait, is an individual skill that can give a bodily form of ethereal thought. Her invioration reminds of music, the handwriting is a solo dance of the pen on paper. Under the same thing that is amazing, the melody.

I was always captivated by the magical power of this dance and, even sitting at the computer, I do not do without paper. Having reached a vague place, leaving without a verb, stuck on a long thought, lost in the maze of the paragraph, I grab the pencil to marry the mind with my hand.

Without handwriting, we are disabled people who forgot about its hidden sense: make the union of soul and body visible. After all, the handwriting is able not only to speak, but also to speak. He knows about us, maybe less than the charlatans-graphologists promise, but still more than we dared to hope.

Having first understood this, the Far East made calligraphy the mother of the arts and the school of civilization. Having opened the printing long before the Europeans, they were in no hurry to put it into business. The Japanese considered it elegant only that literature that found a shelter in flying signs drawing with a whistle brush on the poured dust of paper. A well -written hieroglyph should be dense, like a skillfully packed suitcase, elegant, like a violin key, and strong, like a thing that can be hung on the wall. Many do so. The energy locked in it, as in an atom, is so noticeable that I was not surprised when in America the hieroglyphs became a fashionable tattoo.

But the main secret of handwriting is that it teaches the impossible: to express the external internal. In one unfortunate fragment, dressing, speaking of handwriting, recalls excrement. If, having discarded disgust, to develop this parallel, we really will find common properties: naturalness, carelessness and persuasiveness. As a litter, handwriting leaves unconditional traces that affirm our presence in the world. The product of the physiology of thought, it, as dreams, depends, and does not depend on us. Therefore, losing handwriting is like losing part of the subconscious.