On Writing It by Hand

Everything you have told me, you typed. That is not a complaint, it is simply true, and it is true of nearly every man I know.

Typing is a wonderful medium for an admission you are not sure you want to make. You can write the sentence and look at it. You can soften it, and then soften the softened version. You can hold it there unsent for an hour and send it at last at a time of night that lets you disown it in the morning. And if none of that appeals you can make it vanish entirely, with no evidence that you ever came close. The whole apparatus is built for retreat, which is why you are so comfortable in it.

Try it on paper once. Not to send me. For yourself, and then keep it.

You will find the hand is slower than the thought, which is the point, because you cannot skim past your own sentence at the speed you usually do. You will find you cannot revise invisibly. And you will find, when you have finished, that there is an object in the room that was not there before, and that you now have to decide what to do with it. Where do you put a thing like that. That question is not incidental. It is most of what you have been avoiding.

Some men burn it, and that is allowed, and it still counts, because they had to hold it first.

What I want you to notice is how differently your body treats it. The same words that cost you very little on a screen will make your hand slow down and your face go hot in an empty room. Nothing changed except that this one cannot be taken back. That is how much of your composure has always been made of the undo.