On Control S-ing

As much as I appreciate the convenience that a computer affords when it comes to writing certain types of documents, I must admit a fondness for legal pads and mechanical pencils when it comes to Big Philosophical Ideas. I am persnickety about the legal pads (white paper with a firm back cover) and the mechanical pencils (.5mm HB lead). I will only use mechanical pencils though I fear that the arthritis in my thumb may be a consequence of all my years of clicking to advance the lead. (That seems as plausible an explanation as any other that I have been able to generate.)

I am constantly amazed at people who can read a book and take notes on a computer (more on my note taking style in "Post-it-Wittgenstein" in this issue).  Not me. And I greet people who can write a philosophical piece on the computer with a good deal of suspicion. It becomes too neat; it looks too neat. Yes, yes, I know that you can move things all over a document by cutting and pasting -- the original "leave no trace" writing -- but the results just seem too neat. The document loses its historicity and no longer functions as a travelogue of the development of an idea.

My writing process is messy. I write very elliptically (and no, Smarty Pants Reader, this tendency of mine does NOT date to the dawning of my interest in Wittgenstein). My notes become sentences become paragraphs become pages. I need to scribble on the legal pad, cross out, erase, draw arrows and make good use of the insertion sign. Notes in the margins transmogrify into the substance of the paper.

But despite my unwillingness to write philosophy on a computer, the infernal machine has definitely taken over my body. Recently, while making changes to an essay I was drafting in a notebook, I found my right hand scribbling with a .5 HB, while my left hand reached to press the Control and S keys. I was commanding my spiral notebook to save.