Book, pen, chalk

My eyes are anti-technology. 

They don’t like staring at a laptop screen for hours while reading online articles or e-books.

Apparently, the Amazon Kindle has solved this problem by using “electronic ink,” a new material that doesn’t require backlighting.

But I still want books. I want the tangibility of books, their physical existence.

Margin-scribbling, underlining and dog-earing are all part of how I consume a book and bring it inside myself.

After spending a long time with a book, you get to know its geography: the physical location of each important passage. But this familiarity comes from hunting through page after page to find that one quotation, not by hitting Ctrl+F and doing a keyword search.

Knowing a book is like knowing a place: You build a mental map, internalizing the relations among the peaks and valleys of the book’s landscape.

But I’ve never known the landscape of a scroll bar.

For me, there’s freedom in writing with pen and ink, which is stifled at the keyboard. Typing feels more concrete, more finalized. It’s easier to let go of a critical voice in a notebook than a Word document.

Script also has a subtle beauty. Type is regular – every letter “e” is identical. Handwriting attempts to be consistent but fails slightly. One letter influences the next, forming a continuous stream instead of a line of marching soldiers. This handmade quality is more powerful than mechanical precision.

While writing with a pen, the words you form are close, an inch from your fingertip. When typing, there’s a distance between your body and the product of your labor.

Likewise, there is a certain physical pleasure in doing mathematics on a chalkboard versus a whiteboard.

It’s not that I don’t like whiteboards. I have one in my room. It was cheaper than a blackboard and lighter to carry into a dorm room.

But there’s something more earthy about chalk.

When you finish with chalk, there’s dust on your hands, evidence of work accomplished. 

After covering a board with the hieroglyphics of mathematics, I feel a kinship with the cave painter.

At some level, we are the same. Both of us are scratching rocks against each other. But from that physical process springs something human.

The cave art and my equations are worth creating because they represent ideas. The painter’s marks represent the story of a hunt or a great war; my symbols represent the story of a problem and its solution.

The Greeks did geometry in sand. Writing on a glossy white surface with a plastic cylinder filled with synthetic ink makes me feel distant from my mathematical ancestors.

Mathematics is a mostly frustrating endeavor occasionally punctuated by epiphanies. The physical actuality of paper and pencil, chalk and board, is suited to such a task.

The traditional methods of reading, writing and doing math are more satisfying because of their physicality.

They are old-fashioned. But not “fashion” in the sense of “style.” Instead, “fashioned,” as in “forged” or “created.”

Creation requires work, and satisfaction comes from the physical effort spent in creating.