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.Although not all of us are tidy, we savor certain cleaning tasks: removing the lint from the clothes dryer, skimming the drowned bee from the pool.My father’s most treasured possession is an enormous brass wastebasket.He is happiest when his desktop is empty and the basket is full.One of my brother’s first sentences, a psychologically brilliant piece of advice offered from his high chair one morning when my father came downstairs in a grouchy mood, was “Throw everything out, Daddy!”Alas, there is no twelve-step program for us.We must learn to live with our affliction.Perhaps we could even attempt to extract some social benefit from it by offering our faultfinding services on a pro bono basis.Had a Fadiman or a Bethell been present in 1986, when the New York law firm of Haight, Gardner, Poor & Havens misplaced a decimal point in a ship’s mortgage, we could have saved its client more than $11 million.Had we been present in 1962, when a computer programmer at NASA omitted a hyphen from Mariner 1’s flight program, we could have prevented the space probe from having to be destroyed when it headed off course, at a cost to taxpayers of more than $7 million.And had we been present last year at the Tattoo Shoppe in Carlstadt, New Jersey, we could have saved Dan O’Connor, a twenty-two-year-old Notre Dame fan, from having Fighing Irish tattooed on his right arm.He has sued the employer of the tattooist who omitted the t for $250,000 in damages.I hope O’Connor wins.I can imagine few worse fates than walking around for the rest of one’s life wearing a typo.As the authors of my brother’s software manual would agree, it would be so hard to insert a carrot.ETERNAL INKThirty-three years ago, when I first laid eyes on it, my pen was already old.The barrel was a blue so uningratiatingly somber that in most lights it looked black.The cap, weathered from silver to gunmetal, had almost invisibly fine longitudinal striations and an opalescent ferrule that I imagined to be a precious jewel.The clip was gold and shaped like an arrow.To fill the pen, you unscrewed the last inch of barrel, submerged the nib in ink, and depressed a translucent plastic plunger—a sensuous advance over my previous pen’s flaccid ink bladder, which made rude noises when il was squeezed.My pen was a gift from my fifth grade boyfriend Jeffrey Davison, a freckled redhead who excelled at spelling bees and handball: the prototype of all the smart jocks I would fall for over the years, culminating in my husband.I have the feeling Jeffrey stole it from his stepfather, but no mat ter.The pen was mine by virtue of Jeffrey’s love and by divine right.No one could have cherished it, for both its provenance and its attributes, more than I.Until I was in college, I reserved it for poetry—prose would have profaned it—and later, during my beginning years as a writer, I used it for every first draft.Like a dog that needs to circle three times before settling down to sleep, I could not write an opening sentence until I had uncapped the bottle of India ink, inhaled the narcotic fragrance of carbon soot and resin, dipped the nib, and pumped the plunger—one, two, three, four, five.Muses are fickle, and many a writer, peering into the void, has escaped paralysis by ascribing the creative responsibility to a talisman: a lucky charm, a brand of paper, but most often a writing instrument.Am I writing well? Thank my pen.Am I writing badly? Don’t blame me, blame my pen.By such displacements does the fearful imagination defend itself.During one dry period, Virginia Woolf wrote, “I am writing with a pen which is feeble and wispy”; during another, “What am I going to say with a defective nib?” Goethe, although he had learned elegant penmanship from a magister artis scribendi, dictated his great works to a copyist.This scriptorial remove only intensified his need to control the rituals of composition.He insisted that the quills be cut neither too long nor too short; that the feather plumes be removed; that the freshly inked pages be dried in front of the stove and not with sand; and that all of the above be done noiselessly, lest his concentration be broken.Kipling was incapable of writing fiction with a pencil.Only ink would do, the blacker the better (“all ‘blue-blacks’ were an abomination to my Daemon”).His favorite pen, with which he wrote Plain Tales in Lahore, was “a slim, octagonal-sided, agate penholder with a Waverley nib.” It snapped one day, and although it was followed by a succession of dip pens, fountain pens, and pump pens, Kipling regarded these as “impersonal hirelings” and spent the rest of his life mourning the deceased Waverley.I know how Kipling felt.Pen-bereavement is a serious matter.Ten years ago, my pen disappeared into thin air.Like a jealous lover, I never took it out of the house, so I have always believed that in rebellion against its purdah it rolled into a hidden crack in my desk.A thousand times have I been tempted to tear the desk apart; a thousand times have I resisted, fearing that the pen would not be there after all and that I would be forced to admit it was gone forever.For a time I haunted shops that sold secondhand pens, pathetically clutching an old writing sample and saying, “This is the width of the line I want.” I might as well have carried a photograph of a dead lover and said, “Find me another just like this.” Along the way I learned that my pen had been a Parker 51, circa 1945.Eventually I found one that matched mine not only in vintage but in color.But after this parvenu came home with me, it swung wantonly from scratching to spattering, unable, despite a series of expensive repairs, to find the silken mean its predecessor had so effortlessly achieved.Alas, it was not the reincarnation of my former love; it was a contemptible doppelganger.Of course, I continued to write, but ever after, the feat of conjuring the first word, the first sentence, the first paragraph, has seemed more like work and less like magic.When my friend Adam was sixteen, he bought, for twenty dollars, the letter book in which an eighteenth-century Virginia merchant had copied his correspondence: reports on the price of tobacco, orders for molasses from the West Indies, letters to loyalist friends who had fled to Nova Scotia during the Revolutionary War.Stuck between the pages were hard yellowish scraps that Adam at first took to be fingernail parings [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]