“Because when the ink on the pen hits the paper, the fiber of the paper reaches out and grabs the ink, pulling it in. The ink soaks into the wood fibers, and then you have this continuous, living connection between paper and pen. The flow of the ink into the paper pulls more ink from your pen, to be guided along whatever path you choose. As long as you keep the pen moving—not too slow or too fast—you’ll have a beautiful, smooth, clean line. It’s a giddy sensation, sort of like driving a car that only goes sixty miles an hour. You know disaster looms if you can’t keep up. The possibilities are frightening and exhilarating, and you can practically touch them. You will create something, the paper says; I can feel it. Don’t let go.
Take the tip of the pen off the paper, however, and you break the connection. Pen and paper are two separate things again. Your ideas, if you have any, are stuck in your head like so much backwash. You have to start all over if you want to get your line flowing, your ideas coming out. Printing single letters involves many such stops and starts. So when you use an old-fashioned pen, longhand is much less frustrating. You don’t have to re-connect as often; you don’t leave as many little scratches and blots and half-completed lines where your words cling stubbornly to the pen, afraid to commit to the paper once more.
I don’t suppose everyone needs to learn to write in cursive with a dip pen, but I think anyone can see the lesson in the process: Commit, and keep going. Life requires us to start new lines over and over again, and for some of us it never gets any easier. Sometimes every day is a fight to commit, connect, make something happen.
…
I suspect my great-grandmother was not just disgusted with her family or her homeland; she was annoyed with herself for forgetting what a very hard life had taught her: Go on, go on. And keep going. Going on justifies itself. If you are brave enough to touch your pen to the paper, the paper will do half the work for you. If, like Columbus or my great-grandmother, you step aboard the ship, the ocean will take you far. Like a spindle pulling yarn from a distaff, it is the motion itself that generates. When you enter a new space, find new teachers, take new partners, you can transform yourself and others, now and for generations to come. That powerful, frightening void, drawing ink from your pen, movement from your limbs, possibility from your misery, is your partner in creation, as long as you stay with it. Once you connect to the nothingness, it will pull life from you that you never knew you had.
It takes courage to do this; to reach out your hand, ill-trained and shaking though it may be, to the blank page, the waiting opponent, the silent instrument, the empty life, and say: Come dance with me.”
From Susan Schorn’s excellent “Bitchslap” column in McSweeney’s. I haven’t written in cursive since grade school, but I thought this was a powerfully moving description.