Duffy x Uhlmann // Etch

Post by Misha

I recently read an essay in which a writer (Wendell Berry) explained why he was never going to buy a computer. There were many reasons, but one of them was the pleasure of involving the body in the act of writing, and the desire to see, physically, the written word on the page. Etched, as it were.

Although I do, clearly, use a computer, this hit a nerve with me. I’ve kept a physical journal since I was a kid and I’ve always had a kind of fascination with them. I like going back to them and flipping through the pages without reading, just to see messiness of the scrawl blur by. Entirely apart from what the words say, the way they look and feel on the page hold some magic of their own.

There’s another essay by David Foster Wallace that I’m forgetting the name of right now, but it’s from Both Flesh And Not, where he goes on a digression about why writers write, and he speculates that part of it is that writers, in general, tend to be people who spend a great deal of life internally, and writing is a way to externalize not only the abstract stuff – thoughts and opinions and such – but also to physicalize it. The idea being that life’s work needs, ideally, to be touchable. It needs to have a texture to it. It needs to prove that the internal life – actually, truly – exists.

Buy Doubles, a collaboration between Meg Duffy (Hand Habits) and Greg Uhlmann, here.