As I noted in last Thursday's post, Roland Barthes' notebooks from his trip to China in 1974 have recently appeared in French (as Carnets du voyage en Chine). It may well be many years before an English translation is produced, so I decided to order a copy from Paris and struggle through the text in the original language. The book arrived on Monday, and I opened it with great excitement on the train to work yesterday morning.
I was delighted to discover that the editor, Anne Herschberg Pierrot, has devoted part of her introduction to a description of the writing instruments and materials used by my great hero. It turns out that matters are slightly more complex than I initially thought. The biro-filled notebook that I have once seen is, it transpires, merely the first of four: Carnets 1 and 2 are blue spiral-bound Crown notebooks; Carnet 3 is a smaller, black, Chinese moleskine, complete with a quotation from Mao printed on the first page; and Carnet 4 consists solely of an index to its predecessors. (No information is given about its origin or make.) And the ballpoint scribbling in the parts of Carnet 1 that I have seen does not continue throughout: the editor reports that the books also contain passages written in felt pen. (Pourquoi, Roland?)
Not long after I had pored over these crucial details, I started to flick casually through the book. My eye fell upon a certain paragraph. Time suddenly stood still. My own surname was staring back at me. Barthes had written my surname. As its own sentence.
It's at this point that today's Ink Quest post encounters something of a problem. I have always chosen to keep this blog anonymous, and I am not about to out myself. (I have, in fact, recently deleted all of the information that used to lie on the right-hand side of the page -- interests, favourite films, and so on -- because it suddenly struck me as too revealing.) I can't, therefore, show you the moment in the Carnets where Barthes, thanks to what I believe to be a spelling mistake (I need to check this with my French colleague when I next see him), turns an ordinary French word into my (somewhat unusual) last name.
He's not actually referring to me, of course. It would be flattering to think that my hero, at the height of his intellectual powers, thought it necessary to drop the surname of a Welsh toddler (which is all that I was in 1974) into his Chinese notebooks, but even I know my place. Why, then, am I telling you this story?
Well, dear readers, I have been thinking about the heart-stopping page of the Carnets all day. And I had, until about ten minutes ago, been wondering if the apparent error of spelling is not cher Roland's, but a slip made by the editor or the typesetter. Could R. B., that most elegant of writers, really have been guilty of a spelling mistake?
Apparently so. As I was walking upstairs to the attic at around 9.30pm, I suddenly remembered that I have a book containing colour reproductions of some of the original handwritten pages from what I now know to be Carnet 1. I raced to the bookshelf and found the corresponding page ... where once again I found my surname. This time, however, it was in Barthes' own hand. And in blue ballpoint.
I take this as further proof that the universe is there solely to persecute me; that is the name of the game. On the one occasion that my hero writes my name, he does so because he's made a mistake and he does so in ballpoint pen. All I can find left to say is 'Ah, non!' Anon.
I've always thought that 'invaluable' is a strange and dangerous English word. If I tell someone, for instance, that his or her help has been 'invaluable', I'm saying that the assistance has been so crucial that it's beyond words, beyond a nameable value. So far, so good. But aren't I also suggesting that it has no value, that it's worthless ('in-' = without, lacking)?
And my longstanding worry about 'invaluable' raised its head over the weekend when an envelope containing two vials of ink arrived at Ink Towers. It had been sent from New York by honorary Penquod crew member Stefan, who had, when asked to specify the value of the contents of the package on the United States Postal Service Customs Declaration slip (PS Form 2976), written '$0'. In ballpoint, as you can see in the image displayed above.
I must admit that I always find it difficult, when sending ink overseas, to come up with a value to scribble on the British equivalent of PS Form 2976. Does Royal Mail expect a mathematically accurate figure, arrived at by dividing this by this and that by that, or am I supposed simply to guess? Does anyone actually check these things? (I usually suggest something like £2 for a couple of vials, but I'm worried that there will eventually be a knock upon the door in the dead of night.) I have, therefore, been wondering about Stefan's specified value for the last couple of days, and I have found myself coming back to, zeroing in on, a series of crucial questions:
- Did he choose $0 because the ink contained within (Pilot Iroshizuku Tsuki-Yo, which is a lovely blue, and his own magnificent Black Tulip mixture) is, as real ink, simply beyond value. Would no price, in other words, be high enough to match its majesty?
- Did he choose $0 because the clerk at the post office handed him a ballpoint pen with which to complete the declaration slip, thus negating entirely the glory of the genuine inks contained within the parcel?
- Did he choose $0 because that's roughly what one million pounds sterling (my local currency) is worth in the present financial crisis?
- Did he choose $0 as a form of protest against the ballpoint-dominated world, in which fountain pens and real ink count for nothing. (I am zero, hear me roar, in other words?)
We inkthusiasts know that ink is invaluable, but what do we mean by this? I've managed to come up with nothing for an answer, so I must have entered into a zero-sum game. The Penquod sails on towards nought, but nought tickles when you're all at sea.
Inks in use today: Pilot Iroshizuku Tsuki-Yo; Diamine Indigo.
PS: As zero is in the air, and as honorary Penquod crew member Arty and I are going to see Bob Dylan tomorrow night, the following seems like a fitting Song of the Day:
While I was walking through the centre of the city on my way home from work one day last week, I was seized by the sudden desire to buy a bottle of Diamine China Blue ink. Luckily, my local pen shop was still open, and I found the colour in question upon the shelf. As I sat on the train with the ink held eagerly in my hands, I started to wonder why I had, out of the blue, been drawn to this particular ink, which turns out to be a rather attractive shade. (The punster in me, though, can't help feeling that China Blue ought to be a beige ink.) And I soon realized that Roland Barthes was to blame.
As I have noted in previous posts, the index cards upon which Barthes used to work reveal that the author filled his fountain pens with a delightful shade of blue.
Even though Barthes discusses his love of writing instruments in detail in his writings, I have never been able to determine precisely which blue he preferred; the colour on the card displayed above remains an obscure object of desire for me.
On the day in which I was driven by forces beyond my control to purchase a bottle of Diamine China Blue, I had been looking through facsimiles of some of Barthes' unpublished manuscripts and index cards, and I had, of course, been admiring the ink. Several days earlier, I had discovered, thanks to a brief piece in the Guardian newspaper, that yet more books bearing Barthes' name have been published posthumously in Paris. One is Journal de deuil, a diary of mourning kept by Barthes following the death of his mother, and the other is Carnets du voyage en Chine.
I will, of course, be devouring both of these texts, but it was news of the second that really caught my attention (and not just because, according to the piece in the Guardian, it records R. B.'s complaints about staining a new pair of trousers and failing to catch a glimpse of the genitals of Chinese men during his trip to China in 1974). I have seen one of the original Crown notebooks in which Barthes took notes during his Chinese travels, and I assume that the new book is a transcription of these scribblings. The pages of the blue spiral-bound pad are striking for two reasons. First, Barthes' usually elegant handwriting is decidedly unkempt -- often to the point of illegibility, in fact. But second, and more important, the notes are written in ballpoint pen. Yes, dear readers, that's right: petit R. B., defender of the fountain pen and hater of the biro, made notes in ballpoint pen while travelling in China. Something of a Chinese puzzle, n'est-ce pas?
Well, perhaps not. Maybe R. B. didn't want to take one of his precious fountain pens abroad with him. I, for one, never pack my favourite writing instruments when travelling; my Visconti Van Gogh is reserved almost exclusively for foreign trips these days, simply because I cannot bear the thought of my Aurora Talentum or my Stipula I Castoni being confiscated by a security guard at the airport. (I'd still be upset if the Visconti were impounded, of course, but I do think of it as my 'lesser Italian'.) Or perhaps Barthes was worried about a real pen leaking at high altitude. (Come to think of it, is that how he stained his new trousers? Did the Esterbrook 'J' that he mentions in one of his interviews leak and find itself thrown away en route? I will have to check these crucial details as soon as my copy of Carnets du voyage en Chine arrives from France.)
It was, of course, not long after I first learnt about the publication of Barthes' Carnets du voyage en Chine that I was drawn uncontrollably to Diamine China Blue. And even closer to the moment of purchase, I had been admiring the blue ink used by Barthes on his index cards. I can only conclude, then, that I had unconsciously decided that Diamine China Blue is the colour -- the perfect Barthesian blue -- for which I have been searching.
It isn't, of course. It's pleasant enough, but it's not The One. If my time on the Penquod has taught me one thing, it's this: the quest is unending. Or, as the handwritten notice at the end of Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes puts it, 'One writes with one's desire, and I am not through desiring.' The perfect bottle of ink arrives ... and always breaks into a thousand useless pieces. Like china.
Inks staining neither trousers nor the genitals of Chinese men today: Diamine China Blue; Noodler's Eternal Brown; Noodler's Violet.
I usually add postscripts at the bottom of existing entries, but today my PS, which is all about P's, has its very own Private Space. Honorary Penquod crew member Ken has been in touch to say that, having reread my previous missive about pretension, he has a Pretty Special idea: users of fountain pens should, to show their willingness to be branded as pretentious by the ink-loathing world, take a leaf out of Hester Prynne's book. Yes, dear readers, Hester's 'A' has become the 'P' displayed above, and the plan is that we parade around with the scarlet letter defiantly affixed to our clothing.
The 'A' stood for 'Adultery' in Nathaniel Hawthorne's tale, of course, but our 'P' has the advantage of signifying in several ways. It could stand for 'Pretension', obviously, but also 'Pen' (or 'Plume', for those inkthusiasts based in French-speaking countries), 'Pig-headed' (in that we refuse to give in to the rule of the biro), 'Pedant' (in that we often like obsessively to have everything in its right place, much to the annoyance of the casual and carefree majority), 'Pest', and even 'Pervert'. (I mean the latter in a strictly etymological sense; I'm cutting the word off at its root, as Roland Barthes puts it in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. What you get up to in your bedrooms -- or elsewhere -- is up to you; I'm simply interested in inkthusiasts as perverts in the way that they turn away -- vertere -- from the dominant approach to writing instruments, turn it on its head, turn it bad (per-vertere). 'If writing with a fountain pen is wrong, I don't want to be right', as Ken put it in his message to me.)
(Scar)Let us wear our letters. Let us peel off from the crowd. Let the pealing of 'P' initialize the revolution. PDQ.
Ink in use today: Diamine China Blue. (The full story of my thrilling acquisition of this rather appealing colour will follow in my next post.)
Tony Gilroy’s new film, Duplicity, revolves around the theme of corporate espionage. In a nutshell, Richard Garsik, played magnificently by Paul Giamatti, believes that a business rival, Howard Tully, is about to unveil a world-changing new product, so he employs a team of specialists to steal information from Tully. One of the purloined items is a sheet of paper upon which Howard has prepared a draft of a speech. It is handwritten. The script is elegant; the ink is rich. The fountain pen (a Mont Blanc?) used to produce the lines is big, silver, striking.
Garsik, however, is not impressed when he sees the sheet. ‘Who the hell writes with a fountain pen these days?’, he shrieks. ‘How freaking pretentious is that?’ (I’m quoting from memory, so the words may not be entirely accurate.)
I have, you may be surprised to learn, dear readers, spent much of my life being called pretentious. I have, it’s probably fair to say, hardly made it difficult for the mud-slingers. For instance, I once refused to take part in a sports ‘lesson’ (what’s to learn? or did they mean ‘lessen’?) in secondary school, declaring, as I have probably recalled here in an earlier post, that I was instead ‘going to the library to read Cocteau’. At roughly the same time, and for a period of around twelve months, I refused to wear clothing that was not black. (One of my colleagues who is just a few months younger than I am once said, ‘I bet you were one of those pretentious bastards who spent the 1980s wearing black, being miserable, refusing to go to parties, and listening to Joy Division albums, even though most of us were dancing to Wham!, drinking Bacardi, and having a good time.’ There are several grains of truth in this.) And then, in my final year at school, I formed, with a couple of like-minded souls, The League Against Dance Music. We wore the ‘smiley’ badges that were sported by the ravers (this was 1988 or 1989, when rave was king), but we had drawn a large black cross through the face. While our dance-crazed contemporaries listened to their repetitive beats in the corner of the sixth-form common room, we sulked self-importantly at the opposite end of the room and discussed surrealism, Camus, Wim Wenders, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, communism, French cigarettes, the Situationists, the nouvelle vague, and the quickest way out of small-town South Wales (by sedan chair, presumably). Pretentious? Moi?
Those moments are, I’m relieved to note, two decades behind me. But I have no doubt that the term 'pretentious' is still used to refer to me behind my back. (When does the teenage practice of face-to-face name-calling disappear? When did I start denouncing people only in their absence?) The moment in Duplicity described above does rather neatly put its finger on a widely held belief: users of fountain pens are oddballs, misfits, pretentious. (The same colleague who spent her teenage years living it up to the sounds of 'Club Tropicana' has regularly sighed 'Just get a bloody ballpoint!' when I have interrupted meetings by splattering ink and then having to leave the room to wash my hands.) If you take an interest in writing instruments, if you care about ink, if you refuse to use a ballpoint pen, you are inevitably seen by most people as affected, vain, pretentious. (Again, I have probably not helped myself by amassing a collection of silk pocket squares and luxury shaving creams, and by using a silver pocket watch to keep track of time while lecturing. In my defence, the latter was a thirtieth-birthday gift, and I cringe whenever I see colleagues pushing back their sleeves to glance at their wristwatches in the middle of a class. A subtle glance down at a pocket watch on the desk or the lectern is far more dignified, I feel. I could simply undo my wristwatch and place it in front of me, I suppose, and I have seen signal-conscious colleagues do precisely this, but I like the weight of my watch on my wrist, and I feel unbalanced without it.)
I suspect that most people dislike being called pretentious. But I have decided, dear readers, that it is time for us to embrace the term. And it's all the fault of Greil Marcus.
In Mystery Train's brilliant essay on the music of Sly and the Family Stone, Marcus suggests that something can only be pretentious if it's false. I can remember being struck by that statement when I read it for the first time in the early 1990s (when I was, no doubt, up to something pretentious). I was so struck by the whole essay on Sly Stone, ink fact, that I fell in love with the bleak There's a Riot Goin' On before I'd heard a note of it. Marcus describes beautifully, for instance, how the band took one of its songs from just a year earlier, 'Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again)', and turned it from a happy, optimistic number into the bitter, lost, insular 'Thank You for Talkin' to Me Africa', which is, in short, the sound of a once-uplifting band and a musical genius imploding. Curious readers may wish to compare Riot's savage reworking alongside the original (and sit in stunned awe at the solidity of Larry Graham's bass playing on the later version):
'Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again)' (1970)
'Thank You For Talkin' to Me Africa' (1971)
But back to the pretension, to the crime of being false. I think that it's time to stand up for falseness in life. If it's true that the ballpoint pen rules over the world of writing instruments, and if it's true that real ink is on the verge of being forgotten by the general population, then perhaps the only alternative lies in being as false as possible. Yes, dear inkthusiasts, every time we remove a gleaming fountain pen from a pocket and find ourselves accused of being pretentious, we're actually negating the bland truth of Western culture with a flicker of falseness.
Long live falseness! Don't be tense about your pretence. Enough of the false prophets; it's time for the prophet of falseness. This is not a false alarm; it is a defiant step towards the false, a faux pas. Let our many pretences be false pretences. I am happy, with my array of false affectations, to be the enemy of truth. Through and through foe and faux.
Ink in use today: Sailor Brown.
PS (12 April): I have, in the light of a message from honorary Penquod crew member Ken, decided that a small postscript is perhaps needed. When I proposed above that lovers of fountain pens and ink embrace the label 'pretentious', I wasn't suggesting that we're all shallow, affected creatures. (I am, of course, but I wouldn't want to tar you all with the same nib.) I know that we ink-fingered inkdividuals truly believe in the inkherent superiority of a fountain pen that has been filled with well-chosen ink; we're not just trying to inflate ourselves by creating a flashy image, in other words. My aim, rather, is to reclaim something of the term 'pretentious' and to insist that, if the truth of the world is the reign of ballpoint pens, we might be better off on the side of the false. In other words, I'm suggesting that it's time to think about pretension as something positive, something of which to be proud, simply because it's the mark of being at odds with the general lack of interest in writing instruments. Think, for inkstance, of how the term 'queer' was reclaimed by certain groups fighting for gay rights; 'We're here and we're queer' therefore became a defiant, empowering chant. 'Pretentious' does not rhyme quite so easily, but I've come up with the following, which I offer as a rallying cry: We're pretentious, and it's tendentious. What was once an insult is thus now an inksult.
Anyone who has seen Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho probably remembers the gruesome sequence in which Norman Bates frantically cleans the bathroom with a mop and a towel when he learns that 'Mother' has rather rudely butchered Marion Crane in the shower. 'Mother! Oh, God! Mother! Blood! Blood!', he cries when he discovers precisely what the troublesome Mrs Bates has been up to.
While the famous sequence in which Marion is knifed to death is deeply disturbing -- I don't know how many times I've seen it, but the hairs on the back of my neck always spring to attention as soon as Bernard Herrmann's shrieking score strikes up -- there's a sense in which I find Norman's mopping up even more unsettling. There's something truly horrific about the way in which he splashes the mop around in the blood-stained bath, then runs it down the side panelling. And the subsequent grabbing of a pristine white towel to finish off the job just makes things worse.
I usually like to model myself on another of Hitchcock's characters -- Roger O. Thornhill from North by Northwest, as played to perfection by Cary Grant -- but last night I found myself thrown headlong into the role of Norman Bates.
I have read many horror stories about what happens when you drop a full bottle of ink, but I had not, until yesterday, personally been through the experience. It was about 9.30pm, and I had taken a fairly new bottle of Noodler's Prime of the Commons Blue-Black into the bathroom in order to fill my Aurora Talentum. I had drawn ink from the bottle earlier in the day without a hitch (I was preparing a vial to send to honorary Penquod crew member Stefan), but I was not so lucky second time around. When I unscrewed the lid, the bottle slipped from my hand and fell to the floor. It didn't smash, but it did empty all but about half a centimetre of its contents over the pale wood. And the toilet. And the wall. And the hems of my trousers. And my feet.
Time seemed to stand still. The house was suddenly very silent. I knew that I had to act quickly, as the Inkette had gone up to the attic in order to send a few emails. If she came down and discovered the spillage, I knew that there would be blood and ink to mop up.
As I looked down at the mess, I realized that I had no real idea of where to begin. Because my feet had been splashed, I knew that moving was not a good idea. But moving was going to be necessary if I was to be within reach of something with which to begin mopping up the disaster. Suddenly, as the ink continued to drip from the toilet to the floor, I vaguely remembered reading something about surviving a chemical attack: If your clothes have been contaminated, strip. And so, dear readers, I carefully removed my inky shoes and trousers -- be still, your beating hearts -- and, just to be on the safe side, my jumper. I was now standing slightly back from the spillage in a t-shirt, underwear, and socks. The house was still silent, so the Inkette, I concluded, had not yet finished typing.
Most manufacturers of toilet paper celebrate the absorbent qualities of their tissue; they have clearly never used it to mop up Noodler's ink. My initial attempts to clear up the disaster area with Andrex toilet paper didn't really make much of a difference: within seconds, the paper would be saturated, and the resultant smudging seemed only to make the spillage bigger. Remembering Norman Bates' speedy recovery, I reached behind me for a large white bath towel. I dropped it onto the puddle and watched as it gradually became blue. When it had made a significant difference to the spillage, I drafted in a small sponge, which I repeatedly soaked and used to wipe away what remained. (I did consider dashing downstairs for a mop, but I decided that this might have alerted the Inkette to my desperate race against time.)
After about ten frantic minutes, the floor, the wall, and the toilet all looked as good as new. The towel, however, was ruined, and the sponge had become a dark blue colour. My trousers, I conceded, will probably have to be relegated to the category of 'Apparel to Wear While Painting', but my desert boots -- which are uncannily similar to those sported by Norman Bates in the second image displayed above -- are fortunately dark enough to make the ink stains invisible. (Praise be to Kiwi Multi-purpose Protector, too!) Exhausted, I stood back and surveyed the sparkling scene.
It was then that I noticed it. Just above the skirting board to the side of the toilet was an ink spot. I found a clean corner of the towel and wiped. Nothing happened. I dampened the towel and tried again. Still nothing. 'Out, damn'd spot!', I cried, but it refused to budge (presumably because it had fallen upon matt paint). Just as Norman Bates' clean-up operation is eventually ruined by a tiny scrap of paper that he fails to flush down the toilet at the motel, my perfect recovery had run aground upon a stubborn ink blot.
I decided that I should simply confess to the Inkette. (I did consider blaming the whole thing on Baby Ink or one of the cats, but I quickly realized that they'd all have flawless alibis.) She was not amused. Ink fact, she has banned me from taking ink into the bathroom. Yes, dear readers, a restrainink order has been served.
I am typing these words at 6.40pm. In around three hours, I will need to fill my pens in preparation for tomorrow's working day. But where will I open my bottles? Which room will fill in and allow me to fill in peace? To where can I and my colours run? Speak up and spill the beans, damn'd house! At this moment in time, I can see no way of sweetening the spill.
Inks eventually directed inside pens today: Herbin Lie de Thé; Noodler's Prime of the Common Blue-Black.
The Inkette asks me this question as our car is overtaken by a shiny, noisy sports car. Its driver is middle-aged, balding (or, as Elaine Benes would put it, 'clinging to scraps'), wearing a leather jacket and Aviator shades, and has the roof down (even though it's a cold morning in Inktown). He's been trying to overtake us for the last few minutes, and I've watched with amusement in my rear-view mirror as my deliberately slow driving and impromptu braking has made him angrier and angrier. He finally gets his chance to sail past us and on towards the twilight years of his life.
'Is ink my mid-life crisis?', I ask.
'Yes', replies the Inkette. 'When I first knew you, you weren't interested in ink and fountain pens, so is it some kind of weird interest that's developed as you approach forty? You're hardly going to take up extreme sports, are you, so is this your thing, your equivalent of that idiotic man's sports car, jacket, and shades?'
'You raise an interesting question', I replied.
I've been thinking about the status of my inkthusiasm ever since, and I've been trying to figure out if it's somehow related to the march of time, to my own slouching towards the point at which I'm supposed to lose the plot for a while, arm-wrestle with mortality, kick and scream against the looming of the gloaming. (But when exactly is 'mid-life'? Forty? Forty-five? How would anyone ever know the mid-point of his or her life? As the mighty Roland Barthes puts it, in 'Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure...', 'the "middle of our life" is obviously not an arithmetical point: how, at the moment of writing, could I know my life's total duration so precisely that I could divide it into two equal parts?') And I have, after much deliberation, come to the conclusion that my obsession with finding the perfect ink is not a manifestation of a mid-life crisis.
This is merely because every aspect of life has always been, and will always be, a crisis for me. British television used to air an advertisement for an insurance company whose slogan was 'We won't make a drama out of a crisis'. My motto, by way of contrast, probably ought to be 'I will make a drama out of a crisis. And I will find a crisis where you thought no crisis could possibly exist. Bring me your molehills and watch me turn them into melodramatic mountains. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, and I will soon show them what misfortune is really like.'
Let me give you an example. Every day when I leave for work, my briefcase contains three fountain pens. I spend a great deal of each evening thinking about the colours with which I will fill my pens before I go to sleep. But I also spend a great deal of each train journey to work believing that I have made the wrong choice. Last night, for instance, the combination of Herbin Lie de Thé, Noodler's Prime of the Commons, and Noodler's Eternal Brown seemed like a winner. But as the train pulled wearily out of the station near Ink Towers a little after 8am this morning, a familiar feeling seized me. What were you thinking, you idiot? Lie de Thé and Eternal Brown are a match made in hell. Why don't you just open the window and throw your precious writing instruments onto the tracks? (It's not just ink, by the way. Not long after this kind of thought runs through my mind, I start to believe that my choice of tie and silk pocket square is equally misguided.)
It's not surprising, perhaps, that 'criticism' and 'crisis' share the same linguistic root. My problem (well, one of the many), I think, is that I subject details in which no one is really interested to absurd levels of criticism, thus provoking a general and ongoing state of crisis. For me, vast amounts of time and energy are spent trying to get things like ink, espresso, pocket squares, cufflinks, and shaving creams right. Other issues generally deemed more important by the wider world -- social interaction, professional respect, an opinion on the global economic crisis, for instance -- fall by the wayside as I weigh up the best brown for a Stipula 1.1mm italic nib.
And because I am so out of step with convention, there is little support on offer. I know, for instance, that I could turn on Radio 4 at 10pm and gather enough information to form a solid and untroubled opinion about the G20 summit in London or the situation in Gaza. Help, in other words, is close to hand. But where can I turn at 9.30pm for advice about the inks that I have chosen for tomorrow's working day? Yes, I could ask other inkthusiasts -- members of the Fountain Pen Network, perhaps -- but we're all as lost in the inkwell as each other, aren't we? Yes, I could ask the Inkette, but I know in advance what the response will be. ('You're going to look like an idiot whatever you choose, so it doesn't make any difference.')
But perhaps my eternal state of crisis isn't something to worry about. Wouldn't my life be unbearably boring if I wrote with the same ink day after day? What would I spend my money on if I suddenly found the silk pocket square to end all silk pocket squares? Don't I need the crisis and the relentless self-criticism to carry on? Some experience a crisis of faith, but I think I must have faith in crisis. (Could this wane? Could I one day find myself suffering from a crisis of faith in crisis?) Why confine the crisis to the middle of life? Embrace it. Let it rule all of your days. Hear my cry seize with love crises.
Inks subjected to criticism on public transport today: Herbin Lie de Thé; Noodler's Prime of the Commons Blue-Black; Noodler's Eternal Brown.
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