In this morning's Wall Street Journal, there was an article that caught my eye, The Lost Art of the Handwritten Note by Philip Hensher. He is the author of The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting, published by Faber and Faber, Inc.
Hensher writes, "In the past, handwriting was seen as the key to personal improvement and as an important way to understand other people, both those we knew and complete strangers." This sentence resonated. We are such a digital society that we hardly ever write notes to each other. We tend to be embarrassed by our poor handwriting skills. But I've always felt that handwriting is a key to understanding something about another person. I even remember glancing at books that could "read" your personality traits from your handwriting.
My interest in the unselfconscious doodle is related somehow to this manifestation of our own small motor muscles and our very identity. What could be more personal than one's own signature? And that we still value it, even in the digitized world. How quaint that we are still asked to sign checks and credit card payments as the ultimate legitimizer, our "word" that we will, in fact, pay up.
Hensher writes, "In the past, handwriting was seen as the key to personal improvement and as an important way to understand other people, both those we knew and complete strangers." This sentence resonated. We are such a digital society that we hardly ever write notes to each other. We tend to be embarrassed by our poor handwriting skills. But I've always felt that handwriting is a key to understanding something about another person. I even remember glancing at books that could "read" your personality traits from your handwriting.
My interest in the unselfconscious doodle is related somehow to this manifestation of our own small motor muscles and our very identity. What could be more personal than one's own signature? And that we still value it, even in the digitized world. How quaint that we are still asked to sign checks and credit card payments as the ultimate legitimizer, our "word" that we will, in fact, pay up.
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| Josh's doodles |