New York
The Morgan Library and Museum, an antique among museums, retains a rare group of documents purchased by J. Pierpont Morgan, beginning in the 1890s, the great era of American fascination with handwriting. We can see Beethoven’s manuscript for his Violin and Piano Sonata in G Major, op. 96, with the composer’s ferocious scrawl obliterating a section. A couple of cases away is a manuscript of Mozart, famously free of any corrections, proving that music came through him as if it were the very voice of God.
In a Morgan exhibit of diaries, there is Einstein, writing in German, breaking off abruptly and continuing in algebra that seems to spill from his pen. The shock is seeing that he was truly multilingual, math simply another of his languages. We can see Jane Austen’s lower loops elegantly swooping like cradles under her sentences; Balzac’s frenetic and playful Klee-like marginalia on a printed manuscript; and Emily Brontë’s minuscule print in her private diary.
Handwriting—which I am defining as meaningful marks on paper made by a device held between fingers—is disappearing, and with it, the record of the mind expressed through the body. In the volumes of my own diary over two decades, my handwriting changed as I grew—until a certain age when it acquired a certain look, though continuing to evolve. These markings are like the pencil scratches on the kitchen door showing your height through the years, announcing “I was here” in space—not digital space—and time.
No email can be so physical, no matter how carnal the occasion. I realized this around the turn of the century, the early 2000s, at the end of my first digitally documented romance. In the past, I had stacks of flirtatious notes and photographs to tear up or stash away after romances. This time, I had a complete record of every turning point in emails with attached photos. He was a Wall Street IT man, an engineer by training, and more than once he called and rambled emotionally for an hour or more before he stopped, saying, “I guess I just did a core dump.”
Loss may hit us sideways; the tangibles contain more than we know. At that time, I kept a pale green hand towel from my grandmother’s apartment, which had retained the sweet smell of old age even after a washing. Now the thought came, “I never saw his handwriting”—and I cried, not for him but through him for a loss I could only glimpse then as it began, the end of the pre-digital world.
I mourned a family tradition. My mother had no doubt that handwriting revealed character. She set up a card table at my elementary school fair and attracted a long line, and for years my girlfriends and I brought her notes from our boyfriends, to glean the future, the way girls go to astrologers and psychics. We believed that she was an astute student of a true science. I didn’t tell her when I tried to learn graphology myself and concluded that it is a fraud. In 1871, a French priest called Michon coined the word “graphologie” and assigned traits to variations in letters, making pronouncements like “all weak-willed people cross their ‘t’s feebly.” But modern science has ruled against the core idea that we can reliably determine personality from handwriting samples.
When I ask my middle-aged friends whether they miss handwriting, they mention notes from their dead parents. I have only one birthday card from my mother; when I see her exuberant, large, big-vowelled “Happy birthday, darling! Be joyful,” for a moment she is alive.
For this essay, I asked several mothers if they would recognize their child’s handwriting, and they all looked doubtful, or promptly said no.
Although American schools are still teaching kids how to print, instruction in cursive is fading. A report on the issue from the Miami-Dade public school system begins this way: “Cursive writing has been taught for over 300 years in U.S. schools and was once the principle [sic] way of communicating.” Print is now the principal way, as proven by the fact that only tiny numbers of students who complete the handwritten essay on the SAT use cursive.
Some science suggests that the finger movements of writing cue parts of the brain associated with logic, that words and ideas come more slowly when we use keyboards. Yet among my writer friends, I know of only one who still composes by hand, in a mixture of cursive and print that is characteristic of the most fluid writers. All print meant that you were hiding your personality, my mother said; but print within cursive was “simplification,” characteristic of intelligence. (Yes, I wrote this first draft in a notebook, turning over a new leaf, turning pages.)
Digital documentation is not more secure, unless you make it so. Coming across old emails from estranged friends, lost lovers, your dearly departed, is a more ordinary event: They can turn up by accident in a search, along with phantom Facebook pages, or if you somehow sort backwards by date. Old letters you would likely need to search out, unless you live in a house with random paper lying around. But a computer can die. I have poems I miss stored on drives from computers with floppy drives and stacks of unlabeled discs. Now I keep everything I do “in the cloud” at Dropbox, a name that may sound archaic in my lifetime.
In the past, people who could read did not necessarily learn to write, which was like learning a foreign language. This could happen again. There were many scripts for different purposes, from social to business, and people went to experts to compose their correspondence, or prided themselves on their hand. Teaching handwriting routinely in school helped democratize American life before we became fascinated with signatures in the late 19th century. In early evidence of the American talent for celebrity worship, we collected autographs passionately. At the same time, not incidentally, we came to see our own handwriting as an expression of individuality, along with the idea that each of us is interesting.
Today, of course, we believe all the more strongly that we are each interesting—and the digital world famously offers new means for self-expression. A girl can enter virtual reality and program her own stories in the free time her grandmother spent playing with her signature. I posted a question about handwriting on Facebook and got a torrent of nostalgic responses. A fiftyish friend in advertising sent his version of the lyrics of the Cat Stevens song “Where Do the Children Play?”
Facebook, to me, is an adult playground.
Still, I come back to the body, the blast of physicality that hits us when we see the marks of people of historic importance—say, the bombastic swirls under the signatures on the Declaration of Independence of John Hancock and Benjamin Franklin. Life is more ephemeral when digitized, however preserved. How annoying it is when legal software asks for a “digital signature,” produced by jiggling your mouse to trace shapes on the screen—no doubt soon to be a meaningless vestige of these transitional times.
Temma Ehrenfeld is a writer in New York.
