Does Handwriting Matter?

Does handwriting matter?  Philip Hensker thinks it does.  It’s more intimate, he says.  And it shows our personality.  And after accounting for such important part of our lives, it is disappearing.

I, for one, side with Hensker’s Ph. D. supervisor who, upon being presented with a handwritten thesis, returned it unread.  He was a reader and for us readers, handwriting isn’t such a great deal.

Actually, it wasn’t such a great deal for me as a writer either--from the very early stages.  When I was in grade school, my handwriting skills lagged and things haven’t improved much since.  Though, with laptops replacing typewriters everywhere, at least I am not punished anymore for having bad handwriting.

Schools in Poland had double desks and of course from the first grade, boys sat with boys and girls sat with girls. Except when a boy was being punished and the most diabolical punishment was to make him sit next to a girl. Other boys would pounce on such an opportunity to mock--being called “King of Women” was a great insult. (Nobody seemed to care how girls felt about being made an instrument of punishment).  Having to sit next to a girl was reserved for the misdemeanor of having a messy handwriting. With girls being in general neater than boys, the idea was that a boy, by sitting next to a girl, might absorb somehow, perhaps by sheer proximity, the virtues of good penmanship. 

In practice, the teacher would demand that all pupils open on their desks their notebooks with written work.  She would walk up and down the classroom between the rows of desks and look for what she could criticize.  She would  often stop at my desk and mock my very poor handwriting by comparing it to that of the girl sitting next to me saying something like: “How come you can’t do it if she can.  Look, look how neat her pages are.  And yours?  Ink spots, crippled letters, writing that doesn’t follow the lines on the pages.  Terrible.”

I used to hate that girl with all my heart.  I am ashamed to remember my happiness years later when were had to take exams that would steer us to either academic high schools or vocational schools, I learned that the girl flunked out and wouldn’t continue like most of us. 

My tortuous path to the Russian language

I grew up in Warsaw at a time when its government looked to the Soviet Union as its Big Brother. We all had to study Russian starting in 5th grade. Learning Russian was about the most uncool thing one could do in Warsaw at that time.

At the end of 7^th grade, right before high school, my father tried to speak to me in Russian (he was fluent, having spent the war in the Soviet Union). He was furious to discover that I had learned nothing. I couldn’t even put together a simple sentence.

Four years later, as I finished high school, I thought of myself as too grown up to be subject to parental exams of language proficiency. This didn’t affect the fact that I still knew no Russian, or so I thought.

Many years later I was doing financial negotiations in Francophone Africa (Ivory Coast, Senegal, Mauritania) and my French got to be good enough for me to enjoy reading novels in French. I looked for long novels that would get me through sleepless jet lagged nights. One time I picked up War and Peace. (Reading the book in French makes a lot of sense, since big chunks of it actually were written in French). I loved the book; I realized how much I missed when I read it as a pre-teen (if omitting everything that wasn’t strictly about fighting could actually be called reading).

Tolstoy is a great artist and reading him, regardless of the language, you feel like you are right there, joining the lives of his protagonists. And I was reading him without skipping a single paragraph and somehow I felt that I was hearing and understanding the original Russian. It was an absurd feeling, but it led me to start studying Russian again—seriously this time. As I did, I realized that I hadn’t wasted all that time in high school. Memories came back of my high school Russian teacher, words she said, and texts which she worked hard to get us to read. The Estate of Wormwood and Honey is dedicated to her.