Technology has been a huge part of my life and my writing since high school. I have a shelf of notebooks in my office filled with poems and essays from the earliest point in my writing career, but I’ve gone almost entirely digital now. For a while, the two overlapped, but now, I’m writing primarily in Evernote, though the devises sometimes vary.
I miss my notebooks. I bought some new ones just yesterday. I have about forty unused, like-new notebooks just begging for some ink. I think it’s time I go back, at least in part.
You see, part of my wants a typewriter, though NoisyTyper helps. Another part wants a turntable and some Miles Davis vinyls. Clearly, I’m looking for something different. Something “undigital.” Something analog.
There’s a lot to be said for the writing things by hand, and Rachel Blom has already said a good deal about it. For me, however, it goes beyond the mental and mnemonic advantages. It’s about the heart.
What the Heart Longs For
What do you think our hearts long for more than anything? It’s heaven. Truly. Our hearts long to be with God because that’s where they were designed to be. What’s this have to do with my desire for something “analog”? A lot, actually. Nostalgia is just one aspect of this desire for something currently beyond our reach. CS Lewis says it better than I ever could in “The Weight of Glory.”
In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name.
All of our untraceable desires—for nostalgia, for places we’ve never been, for songs we’ve never heard—are only dim reflections, distant echoes of a place, or rather, a Person whose clarion call is only being heard in hearts.
So I will feed my need for the analog this summer by writing in notebooks. My goal isn’t to satisfy this desire, but to fuel the fire behind it: the desire for that “far-off country.” Maybe it won’t work, but I’ll try. (Of course, computers and tablets aren’t intrinsically less holy than a pen and a Moleskine. Both are man-made technology, though the latter are closer to that “paradise lost” than the former.) My hope is that each pen stroke will force me to slow down so that I can better hear my heart as it hears the distant echoes of His call.
Do you need some analog in your life?
[Volume image via darren.cowley via Compfight cc]
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