The Last Ink

We are losing something. In normal circumstances, these things seem to have infinitesimal importance to us. We don’t really care about them, but in the end, in a way or another, the disappearance of the seemingly innocuous aspects of life will have a profound effect on us. It is quite an irony because we do these things every day, and we take it for granted. The things are writing and reading.

Writing, we are rapidly losing our penchant of writing. At first glance it should feel absurd. Writing is the thing that we do every single day of our lives. We tweet each thing we’ve done, or say the things that cross our mind on the cyber wall… using our PC, or laptops, or smart phones. Some of us have blogs. In addition, we have forms to be filled, exercises, and other academic or non-academic stuff to write about – the main writing tool being the computer. Those are examples of what we call writing isn’t it? In a matter of speaking, ‘yes’ is the answer, but when we think of it traditionally, they are not. Each tweet has limited characters. The same goes to the comments and stuff in Facebook. We don’t write long materials anymore, and we don’t write manually much of the time.

I read an article in NST about this young 15 years old British traveller who visited Penang during its colonial heydays [at that time, there was no such thing as adolescence]. He gladly wrote a journal about the things he saw – the smell, the sights, the sounds, the life of the city. It is not a simple task to capture everything there, but this is the time when writing tells everything. The article didn’t really show the writings of the boy, but stated that the young traveller had brought to life the colourful and wonderful Penang’s colonial times with just ink and papers. You can’t beat that.

I think that is what writing is all about – getting the delights of living alive with just words. We couldn’t remember all the highlights of our lives, could we? Yes, we do take photos, but why rob the pleasures of writing away? We write shorter and shorter as time passes. We don’t know how to write well, let alone capturing the senses in our writings. Our essays are lifeless and bare.

Reading meanwhile is an acquired hobby. Why acquired when it is just a simple thing to do? The reason: many choose not to read. In this modern world, information and entertainment that you get from a book can come easily via the sprawling cyber web. Just a click and you have the things you want. Still, as with writing, reading things on your computer or your smart phones come with a catch [or two] – unlike the conventional method, reading with e-gadgets means that you are not engaging yourself with a higher level of comprehension and you will have an attention span that is short.

Besides, the novelty of the traditional book is something modern thingamajigs can never beat. Holding a real book gives you a feel of reality. Sometimes, you might even smell your book and heard yourself reading it out loud. Flipping a real book excites your senses, every page has new things. Imagine when you’re reading a novel, and you really, really want to know the event that happen to a character, or when you are trying to find an answer to your exercise in a text book. I think that is why books can be so engaging. They rouse our emotions in a way nothing else can.

In the lights of all modern conveniences all around us, we should not pretend that we are losing nothing.