In an episode of his podcast Into the Zone, author Hari Kunzru goes with fellow author Geoff Dyer to visit the home of one of their shared literary idols. On the car ride there, Dyer asks Kunzru how he feels about literary pilgrimage. Kunzru responds, “I am always up for literary pilgrimage, but I am almost always disappointed.” Bleak-spirited as this is, I have to admit that I identified with the notion when I visited Arrowhead, Herman Melville’s historic home in the thinly populated Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts. I’d not gone up to the area specifically to commune with the spirit of the legendary writer, but was instead there to visit my parents and escape Florida’s herd immunity approach to the coronavirus. Isolating myself with Melville was not an act borne of desire, but rather one borne of grave disappointment. In all my years of visiting the area, I’d never felt the urgency to see Arrowhead, but suddenly robbed of my own social life, it was time for me to go and see why a writer, like Melville, would actually ask for such dramatic solitude.
Ellie’s childhood dreams of using radio waves to listen for life in space have finally been realized, at what was at the time the most powerful telescope in the world: When she meets her colleagues that night, she tells them that she’s there to listen for “little green men.”
While Ellie eventually makes her pivotal discovery at a different observatory (the Very Large Array, comprising 28 smaller dishes), Arecibo became for me a symbol of this search. That’s one of the major reasons why the recent announcement that the National Science Foundation has decided to decommission the telescope hit me especially hard. The telescope is a powerful scientific instrument, but it’s also something more.
My job at the bookstore felt like occupational therapy. That was a little joke I told myself. Except only sometimes it was a joke, and sometimes I told it to myself like it was a joyous revelation, as though I couldn’t believe my good fortune that I had found myself in an occupational therapy program. It was a simple job. I only had to be there on time, open the store, put the money in the register in the morning, sell books to customers, keep the displays looking nice. The job felt gifted to me. As though the daily completion of these simple, straightforward tasks were the first steps to living a normal life. It’s true that eventually the small joys of these daily accomplishments would slowly deteriorate. The key taken away from me because I was late too many times; arguments with coworkers; then the new ones didn’t like me. And I knew the job could not last forever; the pay was barely enough to support me. It was not a ‘real job’. But there was a window of time where it seemed like I could maintain it. And there was another window that existed for me, smaller but more infinite; not of time, but of what I could hold onto.
“To me, typing is like work, Gaiman explained in a 2015 interview with Tulsa World. “Writing with a pen is like playing. And you can write on planes when they’re taking off and landing.”
The benefits of putting pen to paper aren’t just for famous authors. For those of us who spend most days in front of our computers, writing by hand has a number of psychological benefits, in addition to giving our eyes a needed rest from the glow of the screen.