I loved colored pencils despite not being good at shapes and color, as a kid I was always going off the edges. However, I've always had a strong fondness for these colorful little woods.
Even the classic pencil, where I happen to underline sentences or quickly jot down a memory, I find it ancient and modern at the same time, you can erase and start again and then it's always there waiting for you sometimes forgotten, it needs no maintenance. Just sharpen the tip with the magic sharpener. However, thanks to pencils, we have dreamed and created imaginary worlds, flowers, lawns, houses, sunsets, and often as children we drew our parents....
"A Pencil a Day" - 33 Nobel Prize Pencils: Steinbeck, Canetti, Handke
Giovanni RenziClick here to view Giovanni Renzi's profile
Giovanni Renzi
Fila History Consultant at Fabbrica...
Published Date: 23 Apr 2020
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Legend has it that the hand of the great calligraphic masters was guided directly by the descendants of the Prophet. If the hand of these, of simple scribes was guided by the descendants of the Prophet then who was the hand of the great writers guided by? This is a legitimate question after seeing the penciled pages of some of the writers who won the Nobel Prize for Literature. We have already talked about one of them, Ernest Hemingway, Nobel Laureate in 1954, in the past few days (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/una-matita-al-giorno-23-temperini-ed-ernest-hemingway-giovanni-renzi/?fbclid=IwAR1INisOaaF8jpf9zaT2XkjXeex2t5ucj1z75cOaeQJSbAJBqrWoWPP5q7Q). However there are many others who used to use pencils to write their works, but let's proceed chronologically.
In 1962 John Steinbeck was awarded a prize. His passion for pencils is well known. He loved the dark pencils with hard tip, he used 24 of the type with the rubber, so loved and used in America (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/tu-vu%C3%B2-fa-lamericano-mericano-ma-si-nato-italy-giovanni-renzi/), which sharpened together and kept in a jar on the desk all with the tip up. With each of these he wrote a few lines. He put the used pencil in another jar and took another pencil. When he had finished all 24 he would sharpen them all again. This was the rhythm of his work. The act of sharpening them was done once and for all so as not to distract attention and concentration.
Steinbeck used an electric pencil sharpener of which he wrote: "The electric pencil sharpener may seem an unnecessary expense, but in spite of this I have never had anything else that I have used more or that has helped me more than this. To sharpen the large number of pencils I use every day - I'm not sure how many but at least 60 - with a hand sharpener would not only take a lot of time but would tire my hand. I like to sharpen them all at once so I don't have to do it again throughout the day."
He didn't like writing with pencils that were too short in fact he said, "In my classic writing position, when the metal of the pencil eraser touches my hand, I retire it." The legend says that he used 300 pencils to write "The Valley of Eden"; therefore 300 butts of pencils still existing as a testimony of a masterpiece.
A habit, that of keeping so many pencils in a jar, is reported in a novel by Truman Capote, made famous by the success of the movie "Breakfast at Tiffany's": "... my apartment; sad as it was, it was my place, the first, and there were my books, jars full of pencils to sharpen, everything I needed (or so I thought) to become the writer I wanted to become".
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Truman Capote like his character also used pencils to write his stories, or his works, and his drafts were done on yellow paper. But let's go back to Steinbeck; it seems that his pencil drafts were very appreciated, especially by his dog Max who devoured the first draft of the novel "Of Mice and Men".
However, it seems that the excessive use of pencils forced Steinbeck to give up his beloved hexagonal pencils because of the calluses and pains in his hands that were formed by the continuous use of those pencils (something we saw yesterday also with Robert Walser). It was his publisher who had to get him pencils with a round cross-section. With these he will continue to write. Lucky for us.
Elias Canetti won the Nobel Prize in 1981. He too is used to writing with a pencil. Those who have seen him work tell of a battery of pencils sharp as spears ready on his desk.
"My safest machine is my pencils. As long as I'm writing, I feel (absolutely) safe. Maybe I write just for that reason. But what I write is indifferent. As long as it doesn't stop.... If I don't write anything for a few days, I immediately feel lost, desperate, dejected, vulnerable, distrustful, threatened by a thousand dangers" and again "I no longer exist, I am a thousand pencils, I don't care what they write, I want to dissolve in those movements that I no longer understand".
Canetti is obsessed with death. He wrote aphorisms and thoughts about it (from 1942 until 1994, the year of his death). The pencils are the only thing that make him feel alive. Of Canetti, in addition to his works, remain the hundreds of thousands of sheets written in pencil that are waiting for 2024, the thirtieth anniversary of his death, to be made completely public. A bit like Robert Walser who was read and reread by Canetti.
In 2019 we have another Nobel Prize winner for Literature who is passionate about his pencils with which he writes all his texts. He is Peter Handke, an Austrian who, in 1985, wrote a book entitled "My Pencil". It is not an easy book to read, in which one finds all the author's love and dependence on pencils.
"The hardness (or softness) of the lead must be chosen: this happens, if one wants to write, on the basis of personal inclinations, again writing requires care and preparation, again it possesses nothing of the cold and instrumental execution, but the pencil itself, which is, it is true, also an instrument, is chosen in a decisive way and the point of its lead will be inclined according to pressures and angles peculiar to the hand that uses it - and only that hand. And again, "The colours of the barrel of the pencil are also fundamental - as well as its circumference and length, its hexagonal or cylindrical shape. I prefer dark colours, and I also love the scent of freshly tempered wood, which seems to bring back the saps and resins that animated it when it was alive.
One of the advantages Handke emphasises is that the pencil can be written on even if it is held horizontally or upside down and, if it is not pressed down too hard, it can be erased completely from the paper: not inconsiderable versatility that allows the writing body positions and freedoms that are impossible with other writing instruments. And here I am reminded of Truman Capote, who described himself as a 'horizontal writer' because of his habit of writing lying in bed with a pencil.
"The lightness of the pencil between the fingers, the edges or the roundness of the shaft, the sharp cone of the point which then, while writing and/or drawing, becomes blunt and rounded, compel one never to forget, while proceeding in writing, the determining presence of the writing instrument itself, its demands (not a few, in fact) in proceeding, so that this compulsion coincides with the sense of freedom and creation that radiates from the text or image as they are formed: the greater or lesser frequency in sharpening the pencil conditions the drafting times, makes or thins the thickness of the mark, and the need that the fingers feel to vary the contact with the writing instrument, to make it rotate a lot or a little, to incline it, the relationship that changes with the hand as, precisely, the length of the pencil decreases, all this will be lost in the printed text or published in digital format, but it is a whole that belongs to the physical and material dimension of the text itself. "This is how Antonio Devicienti describes Hadke's relationship with his pencil.
The choice of writing in pencil for Handke is, therefore, an ideological choice; it is to escape the dominion of speed, he has no intention of "gaining" time.
Peter Handke's manuscripts are incredible. Pages and pages filled in strictly in pencil; perfect lines, well aligned, without second thoughts, with rare additions noted on the margins. Almost exercises in calligraphy.
With Handke's manuscripts, we should repeat the example set a few years ago in Japan with an edition of Basho's The Narrow Path to the Deep North. A book that could be "read" by tracing the signs written in pencil, as if to slowly retrace the time and path that led the poet through a journey of inner knowledge.
In short, writing with a pencil is like tracing the footprints in the sand of someone who has gone before you. Footprints that are words left behind in pencil.
My journey, which began with the memories of a child, has led me to discover a world I did not know, and for this I thank the friends of the hive.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
I love pencils too✏️
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