I decided to revisit this essay because of a tweet I made about the disposable pens used in King Charles III’s proclamation (and not because it was called a “good read” by Butch Dalisay and I just happened to remember the compliment). I never expected that tweet to go semi-viral. I have since muted the thread, but even before that, it already made its way to Fountain Pen Network-Philippines, and was picked up by some foreign pen enthusiasts. Re-watching The Crown also gave me the itch to pick up where I left off, with its juicy letter-writing scenes where fountain pens make an appearance.
The Killers asking, “It started out with a kiss, how did it end up like this?” approximates my relationship with fountain pens: from a random Platinum Preppy purchased for a law school exam, I am now an addicted collector owning about 50 pens and a storage box of inks. The attachment I have for my fountain pens is nothing short of a spiritual bond.
I wrote my way through the Bar Examinations with three TWSBI Ecos, which I would lose along with other possessions in a house robbery. I managed to track one of my stolen phones, almost pleading with the robber to keep everything but my pens. This is no sane man’s request.
With a vacuum-filler pen and a traveller’s notebook (which I also lost in that housebreak), I wrote this to a lover I was then about to lose while drinking alone in a dingy Tokyo izakaya:
One of Japan’s oldest surviving narratives is about Mt. Fuji. It tells the tale of an emperor who loved a princess, later on whisked away back to the moon where she belonged. Unconsolable over his loss, he took the elixir of immortality she gave him and together with the letters he wrote her, burnt them on top of the mountain. He did this to somehow reach the moon and reach her still. The fires never stopped burning.
In the end, he lived a life without her, but that love which gave fires to the mountain never ceased to exist.
I wish I knew this story before I saw Mt. Fuji. Sitting by Lake Kawaguchi, I started writing down feverishly in attempt to capture the magnificence of the scenery. I scrapped everything in the end, thinking that like all great things, the sight demanded—more than anything—humility and silence.
And like all great things, love demands the same measured response. So does loss. So does grief. So does pain.
You went back to the moon yesterday. There was nothing in me to match its luminosity, its sacred silence, its isolation.
Even before this hobby, I knew writing to be a gruelling task, only reserved for the patient and observant. This I speak about writing as an art. (To which I am a mere hobbyist.) Then there’s writing as mechanical skill. I may belong to one of the last generations where learning cursive was required, as kids today can barely recognize letters in that form. As an article in The Atlantic asks, if Gen Z does not know cursive, how will it learn to read the past? Writing (and reading) in cursive is but a subset of the problem: all we have now is the clacking of our keys and tapping of our fingers. We write mostly these days as a matter of function. My pens, however, always bring me back to writing as meditation.
The year we spent in lockdown left so many of us mostly alone with our thoughts, from the most mundane to probing questions of survival. It was a welcome excuse to get my pens to work, journaling for my sanity’s sake and building my to-do lists for the day. I saw my pens more than writing implements—they transformed into tools of remembering. Writing the date on paper somehow eased me out of the existential mess that quarantine made of our sense of time. Now that normalcy has crept back into our lives, my pens are still out and about doing what they were built to do—serve the master’s slow hands in a race against raging thought.
Yet this could only be me looking for an excuse to justify the expense of the hobby, which I have been told not to do when I was still starting my collection. One of the biggest joys of my lockdown, though, was purchasing a black and gold Sailor Pro Gear II Slim for a fraction of its original price. A friend once advised keeping your collection to one theme. She collected demonstrators. I collect whatever I can drop in the bucket every few months, especially when frequent sellers make their awaited posts on the local marketplace Facebook group.
Sometimes I think I doomed myself into maintaining my interest and fascination with pens. I first came for the pens, then the notebooks, and now with entire planner systems.
These days, the only way out of torment is to share it. I have “penabled” some of my friends in the past few years. I would recommend which starter pen to get and with which brand and shade of ink. I imagine a community of correspondence and sharing of thoughts. If the nation is a horizontal, flattened brotherhood of sentiment, the world of pen collecting comes close. There is no pen too cheap; there is no collection too grand. We hunt for the best value that our pockets can still allow. Patron saints of vintage bargains, pray for us.
Pens are partly why I still write letters. I once painstakingly handwrote unique correspondences and went to the post office to send them. This is what I owe to myself, to assert my validity as someone who writes. If we could rebuild the world on our own terms, why not begin with the stroke of a pen?