In the days before ballpoints, fountain pens were tipped with gold to prevent the acids in waterproof inks from rusting them.
If you didn’t want somebody walking off with the gold in your pen, you held onto the cap when you lent it out.
“Desk pens” were made with very long tails, eight or ten inches, which was another good way of keeping people from leaving with them.
My mother, whose planner is as colorful as an illuminated Book of Hours, achieves the same thing by Scotch-taping plastic forks and knives onto her hard-to-source purple and green pens. Sometimes when I visit I set the table with them, and then act confused and hurt when I’m made to put them back.
At my grandmother’s house, not long ago, I found an old desk pen whose rubber internals had fossilized. I was able to have its now-obscure filling system refitted at very modest expense by mailing it to Arizona.
It came back after a few weeks with a note in elegant cursive describing the pen’s make and history, and pointing out something I hadn’t noticed before—the barely visible dents in its elongated tail, which certainly does invite chewing. These are the marks of my grandmother’s baby teeth.
If you want a physical symbol for the difficulty of finding the right words, there it is.
I keep the pen on my desk and use it to plan my dissertation. Whether I have more or less trouble with that than my grandmother had as a child writing thank-you notes for Christmas socks or whatever caused the bite-marks, only the pen knows.
Young people in the act of writing are a popular subject in art, because if you want a child to sit motionless for a while, you can hand him a pen and tell him to write a thank-you note for the objectively delightful and thoughtfully chosen Confirmation present he has just opened.
Even a brief note usually demands a period of frustrated stillness which the sculptor’s marble does not exaggerate.
There are tooth-marks in most of the pens and pencils at this school. After a boy has turned his list of thoughts on scratch paper into an orderly and plausible argument, the bitten pens are the only remaining evidence of the terrible strain of thought.
You hear a lot of things these days about AI writing, good and bad. What’s undisputed is that nobody chews on his phone now for lack of words, the way my students still chew on their pens, the way my grandmother chewed on hers as a child.
In an essay about how to tell friends apart from flatterers, which AI will summarize for you, Plutarch warns us that a flatterer is “usually sober, always busy, and must have a hand in everything: he has a mind to be in all secrets, and in general plays the part of a friend.”
I thought of this recently when Microsoft installed a permanent floating Copilot button in the corner of Word, which spontaneously offers to summarize my own work for me. We used to call this “writing an introduction.”
If the document is blank, the floating button offers to “generate an outline.” Of what? God knows. It just wants to be involved.
No AI, if I asked it to summarize Plutarch, would be self-defeating enough to suggest that I’d miss something by relying on its summary alone.
No AI will gain market share by telling me that I might find time to read Plutarch firsthand if I got off my phone now and then.
These are things a good friend, or a good teacher, might tell me. But AI is not a good friend, it is a flatterer.
Its business is to tell me what I want to hear, beginning with “You’re absolutely right.”
I have never heard it say, “You don’t need me to summarize Hobbes. Go and attempt a difficult paper that will reveal your intellectual shortcomings, so that you can cure them, arduously and after many failures.” Still, that’s what a brain is for.
I want to teach my students to prefer the grind of real thought to the pointless ease of slop, as Ateas preferred the neighing of his battle-horse to the music of flutes.
I want my students to turn into people who like being able to think, and who no longer wonder why they have to. A lot of pens are going to get chewed up in class as I pursue this foolish and outdated dream. I guess that’s all right.