WRITING […] the use of letters, symbols or other conventional characters, for the recording by visible means of significant sounds; more specifically, the art of tracing by hand these symbols on paper or other material by pen and ink, pencil, stylus or other such means, as opposed to mechanical methods such as printing.
I like reading. I like writing. I like the fact that somebody (to be more precise: a lot of different somebodies) came up with the idea that one could scratch down some permanent markings on a surface, some symbols to represent different sounds, and then one could string together a bunch of those symbols and it would represent words, and then somebody else perhaps could read those permanent markings and understand. And this way ideas could be transferred, and knowledge and feelings, too. It’s brilliant at a level of touched-by-God! And even better, a standardizing of those systems of writing were then agreed upon (without a meeting, without a vote), so now I can read something written down by a person I haven’t met and perhaps even a person whose very identity I don’t know, maybe somebody who lived and died many hundred years before I was born.
Thoughts, emotions, knowledge, transferred across time and space from one mind to another.
That’s magic.
Bibliography
- Encyclopædia Britannica. 11th. ed. 29 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1910-1911.