Tue 19 November 2024

In Part II, I went over the items in my backpack. In this edition, I will talk about a single item in detail: fountain pens.

Growing up, I really disliked writing by hand. It was very uncomfortable, and my handwriting was extremely messy, to the point that my classmates would complain about it to the teacher. It was bad enough that I literally lugged a small Brother pen plotter typewriter with me to class in seventh grade, and that thing was not quiet.

The problem was significant enough that test-taking was stress-inducing — not because of test anxiety, but because of the physical discomfort of holding and using a pen or pencil for an hour at a time. A professor at university even commented that he saw me wincing and massaging my hand.

I'm not exactly sure what the problem was — possibly some kind of fine motor control issue coupled with having fairly long fingers (disadvantageous leverage). The amount of force required to hold a thin ballpoint in my hand (pens with built-in comfort grips and/or larger-diameter barrels weren't as common thirty years ago) and apply steady pressure to the page was enough to fatigue my hand very quickly.

Fortunately, I grew up just before the Information Age, and it wasn't very long that having some kind of typing device with me at all times was pretty feasible. And before that, secondary school was easy enough that not being able to take meticulous class notes (or hardly any, really) wasn't a big issue.

All that changed one random day in 2015 when I was watching an ASMR video while trying to fall sleep. This guy was (very slowly) demoing a Platinum Plaisir fountain pen, and for some reason, it appealed to me, and I ordered one. Now I did have a fountain pen growing up, but I didn't really understand what the point of it was, so I never used it much.

When I got the pen in the mail, I found that I suddenly enjoyed the process of putting ink to paper so much that I just sat down and copied several pages of Kierkegaard's Either/Or to paper. For someone who hates writing on paper, that is amazing.

That first fountain pen supercharged my in-class notes that summer, and once I eventually switched to a little nicer pen (I tried several, finally settling on the TWSBI Eco) just a month later, and nicer paper (Clairfontaine notebooks are super smooth for fountain pen writing), I found that I could just fly when taking notes in class, to the point that I was writing too much, and not processing the information sufficiently — just as if I was typing class notes on a computer.

The major difference is that a fountain pen needs so little downward pressure to make a good line that just the weight of the pen is enough. Instead of having to hold onto a skinny little stick of a ballpoint pen with a death grip, I had a more comfortable grip (even on the smallest fountain pens, like the Pilot Metropolitan), and didn't have to hold it with a lot of force. I was guiding the pen, not fighting it.

Another reason why I so enjoyed using fountain pens is that the physical connection of pen nib to the page brings the mind into a kind of immediacy, textural awareness, and cognizance of artistic freedom that just isn't there with a ballpoint. You feel the page in a way you just don't when you're slobbering pasty ink onto the page with a rolling metal or ceramic ball.

Note: This article has a Part IV!

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