#19: The Pencil

The Pencil: the ultimate writing tool. However useful or quick or easy typing on a keyboard may be, I always find hand writing the most creative. I can write in all directions in my notebook, even turning it upside down when it takes my fancy.

Although I write in pen for my notebook. The pencil is for reading. I’m beginning my third week of Michaelmas term, and it’s serious reading time at the moment. Essays will start soon, but for now, it’s time to read. And when I read, I always have a 2B pencil to hand. Forget HB. When writing in old copies of books, when the paper is so soft that the pencil marks barely show, it’s 2B that makes a satisfyingly dark mark.

Yes, I am one of those who scribbles in the margins of my books. Not just the margins — all over the page. Circling, underlining, writing in all directions and available space. I am a lover of marginalia, particularly when I buy a secondhand book and find it has the previous owner’s notes for me to read, the spontaneous thoughts that came as they read that particular line.

If I think a thought, but do not write it down, intending to do so later, then I forget it, however memorable I may think it is at the time. A pencil must always be to hand, and a handy pencil sharpener as well. The pencil is the English Student’s principle tool, and I always feel lost without it.

Like in Eleanor’s post about her typewriter, the pencil is something physical that helps us to create something physically there on the page. However popular ereaders may be, I cannot use them for studying, because I cannot write all over the pages, fold corners down, and memorise where things are on the page. That feeling of holding a sturdy paperback book in one hand and a pencil poised in the other is one that I do not want to let go of. It is part of who I am as an English Literature student. Not only do I read, but I think about what I read, I question it, challenge it. I copy out quotations by hand that touch me in some poetic way, I write derogatory comments on the side of the page when the character is doing something supremely stupid.

The pencil provides me with a voice in the novel I am reading, in the poetry that I am trying to understand. I make it my own by making my own marks on the page, adding my own thoughts between the lines. With a pencil I can make a novel my own, claim it. I can also leave a legacy, for when that book no longer belongs to me. Somewhere in the future someone will pick up one of my books, and wherever I may be, part of me will still be contained in that one copy of that particular book. They will be able to read my thoughts, however enlightening or mundane they be. A legacy of spontaneous thought marked on the page.

What a powerful act from so small, fragile, and disposable a tool.