The C.S.-Lewis-and-all-things-adjacent book club of which I am a member read The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham in January. One of the four principle characters in the book is Mr. Toad. He is a wealthy, voluble, landed “gentleman” who flits from one passion to another. We first become aware of this propensity as we read about the disused boats hanging in his boat house, artifacts of his most recently abandoned hobby. He moves on to the life of caravanning in a perfectly appointed, horse-drawn, wooden caravan, only for it to be run off the road and wrecked by a motorcar on Toad’s very first outing in it.
And even as the caravan sits ruined in a ditch, Toad sits in the middle of the road, as still as the proverbial fork, mesmerized by the vision of speed of the retreating motorcar as he quietly mouths, “Poop, poop.” And he is off on a new pursuit.
Graham goes on derive the book’s greatest moments of humor from Toad’s subsequent pursuit of motorcars, which lands him in the hospital multiple times and then in jail and then in a catalog of scrapes as he escapes from prison and makes his way home.
I am certainly not as pompous and reckless and heedless of consequences as Mr. Toad (nor, alas, as wealthy), but, I can relate to his ever changing fits of passion. Over the past few decades, I have been enamored of bicycles to varying degrees; camera equipment to a great degree. During the pandemic, it was watching bushcraft videos and collecting axes and learning to split wood…and getting a pickup truck and picking up logs to further aid in this endeavor. Acquiring mustaches and wax and bushy beards and beard oil were also sort of corollary pursuits to this phase. Sigh. There have been other flitting passions, too: selling thrifted Doc Martens on eBay, making sauerkraut, and, yes, the varied food fads linked to diets…you get the drift.
The throughline between them all seems to be an aspirational goal to become something different, which never quite works out the way one envisions it.
My current fad is only several weeks old and was incited by this Wes Anderson ad for Montblanc pens (did you notice the mustaches?).Montblanc pens are prohibitively expensive, but of course, of course, there are hundreds of different options to be had on specialty websites and on Amazon. And, oh, the YouTube videos!
I have acquired my first fountain pen-an inexpensive, very sturdily built model from China-and another from the same brand is on the way, along with some brown ink.
And having acquired the basic tools for this hobby, which are very aesthetically pleasing in themselves, I have set about practicing the aesthetic aspects of the craft of writing by relearning cursive. And, well, as is the case of parents arriving at what they deem a creative and clever and, above all, unique baby name, only to discover three other “Audreys” or two other “Liams” in their child’s Pre-K, I have discovered that I, too, am not alone in this interest. We are in the throes of a cursive resurgence!
And I am here for it. And I am glad that others are, too. Whatever we can do to integrate the body and learning, the body and creativity, the body and…anything is a plus in my mind, to push back against the tide of electronically mediated (like this blog) living, especially for the young.
One question that immediately occurred to me as I set out on my journey “of writing prettily,” was considering what impact it would have on, you know, “writing prettily” or rather writing well. I certainly wouldn’t want to become, say, a male correspondent in a Jane Austen novel of whom it might be said “he has an elegant hand, but an insipid style and nothing at all to say of consequence or of wit or wisdom.”
I shall endeavor to do both. And as if to spur these endeavors along, today I discovered the papers pictured below that my workplace had set out for free. They are printer paper, so I shall have to see how they take up the ink, but maybe they will be good for letters. If you would like to receive one, give me a shout.
