Handwriting, Mrs. Dalloway, & Flying Letters
by Erin Doom
Feast of St Sergios the Confessor
Anno Domini 2020, May 13
1. Essays et al: “The Heartening Boom in Handwriting”
According to Melanie McDonagh, the upside to lockdown has been more handwriting, at least based on purchasing habits at the upscale British stationers, Smythson:
It’s seen an increase of over 80 per cent in stationery sales in April. The range of plain stationery is up by more than 200 per cent. Record books – for journals – are up by over 70 per cent; notebook orders have doubled and telephone and address books sales have increased by 355 per cent.
Furthermore, based on a survey of 1,200 young people, aged 11-21, it’s clear their preference is to write their thoughts and feelings down on physical paper, rather than typing them into a computer or phone. McDonagh concludes:
Engaging with the online world is by some distance less beneficial than actually writing stuff down. There’s something about the process of inscribing physical ink on a physical page that involves our brain and hand in a more sensual and immediate way than the fingers-keyboard-screen nexus.
Putting pen to paper is a physical activity: you see and feel the medium you write with – whether it’s pencil, pen or ballpoint. Cardinal Newman wrote with a quill up to his death at the end of the nineteenth century, and he was a prodigious letter writers (his correspondence fills 30 volumes). What that meant was that he, like every other writer up to modern times, constantly heard the scratch of the nib on paper, constantly modified his writing to take account of the flow of ink and the avoidance of blots. Handwriting means you engage with a writing instrument. And with the physicality of the paper…woven, smooth or textured, thin or thick.
More:
This sensuous aspect of writing may explain why handwriting – sequential hand movement – seems to engage parts of the brain that keyboard use doesn’t, as shown by magnetic resonance imaging. And cursive script – longhand – means that the flow between brain and hand is more fluent than if you don’t use joined up script.
An obvious aspect of writing by hand is that you have to think before you write; your sentences are formed in the brain before you put them down. If you make a mistake on screen it’s easily remedied. When you’re writing on paper, there’s an incentive to avoid error and get the sense formed before you begin.
2. Books & Culture: “The First Reviews of Every Virginia Woolf Novel”
From Literary Hub:
Ninety-five years ago this week, Mrs. Dalloway—arguably the most famous work by iconic modernist writer and pioneer of the stream of consciousness narrative technique, Virginia Woolf—was first published. Capturing the complex and disquieting interiority of Clarissa Dalloway, a fictional high-society woman in post–WWI England, over the course of a single day, it is considered to be one of the greatest novels of the 20th century.
Though troubled by debilitating bouts of mental illness throughout her life, culminating in her tragic suicide in 1941 at the age of 59, Woolf was an astonishingly prolific writer—of novels, short fiction, essays, literary criticism, and drama—and by the 1930s had established herself as one of the most revered public intellectuals of the era.
To mark this auspicious literary anniversary, we’re taking a look back at the first New York Times reviews of each of Woolf’s ten novels, from The Voyage Out (1915), to the posthumously published Between the Acts (1941).
3. Bible & Fathers: St Augustine on Liberal Studies, Letters, & Heresy
Acts 14:6-18; Jn. 7:14-30. Online here.
Here’s a short but fun little bit on liberal studies, letter writing, & heresy in a letter composed by St. Augustine “to his cherished and beloved brother Emeritus” (Emeritus was a Donatist bishop of Caesarea in Mauretania, i.e., a heretic):
When I hear that someone endowed with a good mind and trained in the liberal studies – although the salvation of the soul does no depend on that – has a view different from what truth requires on a very easy question, I both wonder and ardently desire to know the man and talk with him, or, if I cannot do that, I long at least to meet his mind and be met by his through letters which fly afar. I hear that you are such a man, and I grieve that you are severed and separated from the Catholic Church, which is spread through the whole world, as it was foretold by the Holy Spirit. ~Letter 87
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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