What’s the Urge of the Letter?
Perhaps you’re wondering where I’m going with this graphomania. What am I doing with all these trivial observations on ink, wax, print, and pixel? How can I hope to draw together the strands of writing, cognition, evolution, art, literature, religion? What’s the epitome, the gloss, the nut graf, the takeaway?
Well, the easy answer is, I’ll tell you when I’ve found it. But I do have a hunch, or a hope.
Though the ways of writing have proliferated through time, they’re connected like some existential cursive stretching from clay tablets to computers. The letterforms with which we’re most intimate—those of the Roman alphabet—have traveled a long way since their birth as sketchy renderings of oxheads and houses. But they still carry those shapes, along with marks left by Greek scribes and Roman stonecutters, medieval monks and Renaissance goldsmiths, designers and sign painters and artists and engineers.
And all this stuff we’re doing with pixels and silicon, with networks and nodes, tweets and tumblelogs? It’s not the negation of all that came before—it’s not the end of the world as we know it. It’s just the next loop, part of the cursive line.
A species like ours can do perfectly well without writing for millennia upon millennia—but once we take the plunge and blunder into writing, we had better be all in.
