Why pencils are still in use today

S. Pathiravitana

With all our technological achievements, we, adults have still not done away with the use of the little pencil. Yes, pencils. Some years ago, when I was working for an American organisation, I walked in one day to drop in on my associate when I found him using a pencil-eraser combination to write with. (My computer has just warned me ‘End-of-sentence preposition). Consider revising.’ Bill Gates has obviously not read what I wrote some time ago.

There, I pointed out how an authority like Fowler scoffs at the rule forbidding the ending of a sentence with a preposition as a superstition. Bill Gates should be pulling up his socks and his grammarians on Microsoft for not being up to date with regard to modern English usages.)

Sorry for the interruption. I was trying to say that in the days I was referring to, there were no computers or electronic pocket calculators to disturb the virginal purity of office routine. So I asked my associate, ‘John, why are you using a pencil?’ Men of honour, I thought, should be using fountain pens not pencils.

‘That helps me to put down my thoughts first,’ he said, ‘before I begin the day.’ Later I discovered how ignorant I was to ask this question. Nearly every American great I have heard of has been closely associated with pencils.

Thomas Alva Edison had a stub of a pencil in his shirt pocket with which he used to take down notes of his observations. Closer to our times Ernest Hemingway’s highly placed novels came from the end of a pencil point. John Steinbeck just couldn’t do without pencils. He is reported to have used as many as 60 pencils a day when writing two of his great novels, The Grapes of Wrath and Cannery Row.

Even some of the founders of the American Constitution were greatly supported by pencils. Benjamin Franklin, for instance, ran an advertisement in his paper The Pennsylvania Gazette selling pencils. Also, George Washington carried along with him a three-inch pencil when he went to survey some territory in Ohio.

And today space flights of the Americans may never have turned out successful if the space men and women left behind on earth their pencils. Fountain pens and ballpoint pens just failed to perform when they were further away from gravity. So, you can see the pencil is literally flying high today though invisible to us.

Here, for instance, is what happens to a pencil writer in space as reported by Astronaut Peggy Whitson of Space Expedition Five: “It really takes some time for your mind to let go of the idea that you don’t have to hold onto something —- that I can let go of a pencil and it doesn’t fall.

However, I learned early that things have a way of disappearing! I have already lost more pencils/pens than you might think possible. Interestingly, you can ‘lose’something and it will be floating right next to you. The best approach to finding lost items, told to me by Dan Bursch, is usually to change your position slightly and look from a different viewpoint. I don’t know what it is about how the brain is processing this info that makes moving your body position easier to see something that was right in front of you.”

I, however, did not know all this when I came to journalism over half a century ago. Typewriters were just coming into play and if the pencil habit was wending its way out, I found the use of it in a modern streamlined office rather odd.

It was odder still to find my news editor, a brilliant man at that job, every now and again sharpening his pencil point by swishing it back and forth vigorously on the floor. He was quite attached to his pencil and treasured it as if it were the sole source of his information. But, as Jon told me, the pencil still found a place in office thinking and writing.

The other prejudice I had against pencils was that pencils were too closely associated in my mind with child’s play. At the very beginning of schooling, the need to use pencils didn’t seem to arise. As we went on, however, we learnt a few words, and there came a time when you had to put them down in writing.

As we completed writing a word, the instructions were to place a finger next to it and begin writing the next word. Inch by inch, as it were, you were now inching towards knowledge. And, to adapt an old Chinese saying, starting a literary journey of a thousand miles begins with but a single written word.

I was wondering how, in our ancient non-literate but learned societies, writing began without pencils. Necessity being the mother of invention, as they say, there was perhaps no need to invent them. It was different when it came to the use of materials for writing on; there was papyrus in Egypt and ‘pusskola’ in Ceylon.

Even if pencils were invented then, they could not be used to write on either of the two just mentioned. We had, instead, a metallic instrument called the panhinda (stylus is the word in English) with which you could mark letters on the ‘pusskola,’ which was a dried and processed strip of palm (talipot) leaf, to receive any markings made on it.

A black powder was then dusted over it and, hey pronto, there appeared on it the most beautifully written letters. This was a highly trained craft and children could not play with them as they now do with pencils.

For children there were sand pits then, where they could trace their tiny fingers forming ayanu aayanu. The whole described as pillang liyanawa. With modernity tapping on our doors, soon the little sand pits disappeared. Learning was no longer a play, but was now a serious business.

The competition among teachers, educationists and parents to push our children not so much into learning as to how much they can soon be earning out of learning is the crux of our modern education problem. But let us get back to the first step in education - the pencil. My impression is that when children are promoted from year two to year three they kiss their pencils temporarily good bye. At least that was my experience.

In year three, you are introduced to ink, inkwells and pens with G nibs. Now this calls upon the children to take extra care about tidiness or else the ink will soon be on the hands or on the floor or on the dress or on all three. The use of ballpoint pens was unheard of in those days.

When they came, teachers were in two minds - give into the new and preserve classroom tidiness or preserve the old and improve the handwriting of children. I do not know how they resolved that problem, but I know that seniors are being permitted to use ballpoints.

But that has not made students look askance at pencils, they are much sought after now for making sketches of objects described in the classrooms by teachers and lecturers and also by artists who need that extra black from an HB pencil to rival Leonardo da Vinci’s pencil sketches.

This reminds me of the occasional gifts I receive from friends and relations living abroad. I once received a gift of some office stationary, which was sufficient to meet the requirements of a miniature office.

I was amused indeed, but not for long, for what I thought were needs that would last well beyond my twilight years have all but vanished now. Soon I found that there were more of my people, right down to my fourth generation, using pencils and erasers faster than John Steinbeck or for that matter Ernest Hemingway did. So much so, when I look around in a hurry for a pencil today to jot down some one’s phone number, there is none near by.

There is one little bit of advice given by Harold Nicholson, scholar, diplomat, Parliamentarian and a very charming writer. A simple expedient he recommends is to have a pencil by you when you read a book. The moment you come across an interesting item, draw a line under it and just refer to it briefly by jotting it down with page number on the blank page invariably found at the back of any book.

This is a way of referring quickly to what you have been reading and saves you the time of re-reading the book or turning the pages hunting for it. I know, because I have followed his advice.