Writing by hand differs from typing or (that abominable verb) inputting. I do a lot of both, so I’m able to compare.

Script on a page, produced by ink and fingers, generates an artifact. Unless rushed, enraged, or tipsy, my script is neat, conscious of subsequent eyes assessing my remains. I’m pleased when my script is called handsome, this thing I’ve made, like a flower arrangement or bouillabaisse.

Poems can only be composed by hand – or prose which aspires to the condition of poetry. I write in expensive leatherbound journals with deckle-edged paper made to seem handmade. This is an extravagance, I suppose, but it promotes my scrawl into “a work,” with a commencement, conclusion and position in time’s parade. Each of a volume’s 168 pages (front and back) contains about a hundred of my words (fewer of verse, of course). They fill at a rate of about a volume a month, adding two hundred thousand words a year of proof I walked the earth.

I input too. Sometimes missives force-march straight into my laptop, if they feel fully formed or concern you know who. I never permit that vile personage to pollute my private precincts. So do we keep our altars clean for the cleansed.

Inputted words for me only half exist. I can access them, amend them swiftly, whiz them to you, but they lack the reek and taint of their gestation, that unstinting actuality which swathes experience. Just now, in the deepening dusk, titmice, a finch, woodpecker, and eye-popping male cardinal pother the birdfeeder which swings like a big bell’s clapper in the shrieking wind. Henry, tired from our morning walk, curls at my feet. Memory preserves such details, of which my computer screen notices none.

Reading Charles Lamb nudged me into this reverie. Though Lamb (1775-1834) was beloved by many literary titans of his time (Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Hazlitt, De Quincey, Southey, Godwin), his life was small, circumscribed, deliberately slight. He noticed small things and composed prose as if he was stroking a cat. I’d read him younger, and while admiring his elegant eloquence – it’s impossible not to – we did not bond. My aspirations then were heroic, restless, reckless – tragic, if need be, but not quiet, modest, soft. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Thoreau, Emily Dickinson were idols, all of whom took their lives VERY seriously.

Maybe it’s my age or the raucous ruckus of our hour or the ubiquitous toxicity of the Nameless One and his goons or my deflating faith in our species, but these days I feel myself craving the small, the quiet, grace, a holy hush. We’ve so much to love of life, why must we harass ourselves with ugliness, cruelty, cacophony! Look about you, Carll – at the busy birds, the light on the arborvitae, at my wormlike pen trailing across the textured page – and be glad while you can! Yes, we’ve cause to moan and dread – and we must never avert our gaze – but we’ve cause, too, to rejoice – and to seek joy and share it is no less a moral urgency than to berate and lament.

Especially in this dark hour we must remember why it’s a gift to live. Lamb as a young man witnessed the most horrifying horror imaginable: his beloved sister murdering their beloved mother in a psychotic rage. This episode would have crushed a less sturdy spirit, yet he decided to rejoice, to be content in his small life, to delight in slight details, and to compose his quiet, tender, attentive prose. His gentle spirit urges me to observe – even black ink unfurling across a creamy page – and grin.