How You Write is Who You Are

I am 100% sure I am not the first in this overcrowded world to bemoan the rapid disappearance of respectable penmanship. What was once perceived as a sign of distinguished education and privileged upbringing is now a lost art form, replaced by the mechanical tick-ticking of the keyboard. Style has been sacrificed at the altar of speed and convenience.

What we now have is a lost generation of youths incapable of controlling the biro – a device, surely, a lot less challenging than the Blackberry. You have indecipherable scrawls and reckless scribbles instead of graceful swirls and confident strokes. You have digitally conditioned minds struggling to establish an affinity with aesthetics but failing miserably.

This is because we prize expediency and economy above all things. Time is $ - that old cliché – so why should anyone waste time putting a pen to paper when the ticking of keys is so much more instantly gratifying? This is where the digital age has failed us. It has made us forget beauty is to be found in words thoughtfully chosen and written out. It has made it acceptable to neglect the maxims of formal writing (“&” cannot replace “and,” “isnt” is not a word) and standard grammatical rules (the apostrophe does not deserve this much abuse).

There will of course be voices that disagree, young voices that know nothing else but the tick-ticking of the keyboard and the swift deleting of unwanted words (and the equally swift adding of callous words). They should, however, keep in mind that as long as there is paper and there are biros and fountain pens, they will always be measured and judged according to the way they write. The moment you scrawl down that sentence, unequivocal judgement will have been passed as to whether you are an enlightened scholar or a bovine ignoramus.

In case you are wondering, I wrote all this by hand before typing it up – a ritual I hold sacred.

Approaching Haruki Murakami’s “Kafka on the Shore” the Jungian Way

“The world of gods and spirits is truly nothing but the collective unconscious inside me.” – Carl Jung, On the Tibetan Book of the Dead What appears to be supernatural and surrealistic in Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore does not have to remain that way once we accept that in Murakami’s fictional world, the natural and the supernatural often cross paths and become one single unity. In the previous three entries on the novel, I have extensively discussed its relation to Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex . But here I intend to explain why the supernatural should in fact be deemed natural, and how this reasoning is a direct reference to the theories of Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung and German philosopher G.W. F. Hegel, both of whom are mentioned in the novel. Carl Jung’s psychological theory on the “collective unconscious” (the notion positing that all humans – regardless of race and culture – share a psyche containing “latent predispositions towards identical reactions” [1...

Murakami Salutes Orwell: How "1Q84" Pays Homage to "1984" (Part 2)

Here the reader arrives at the junction where Murakami’s work crosses from the metaphysical to the real and tangible, for in the single-moon world we have also had the misfortune of witnessing writers persecuted for their ability to tell a different “truth.” Salman Rushdie’s fate after the publication of The Satanic Verse is well-documented and needs no reiteration. A more discriminate look at literary history gives us several more voices hushed by the Authorities: Turkish author and Nobel Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk was arrested for comments about the massacres of Armenians in the First World War. Nigerian protest author Ken Saro-Wiwa was tried by a military tribunal and hanged. Yu Jie, author of China's Best Actor: Wen Jiabao , a controversial book that cast a critical light on the premier, landed in hot water with the Chinese authorities, and had to emigrate to the USA for his own safety. His close friend and Nobel Prize-winning literary critic Liu Xiaobo called for politic...

The Thinking Man’s Bible and Messiah: A Personal Reading of Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” (Part 1)

A great many clichés we usually associate with Nietzsche – “God is dead” (often quoted out of context), “Man must be overcome,” “the Übermensch ” – have their origin in the infamous 1883-5 text Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None ( Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen ). It is a “treatise” generally ignored by professional philosophers for being “too artistic”; for the common reader, if he is not religious, it is a trying reading experience due to its cryptic nature, and if he is a believer in God, a full-frontal attack. It is a text many have heard of (and think they can quote from it), but few have seriously read from cover to cover. My aim is to synopsise some its recurring (pun intended) messages and explain why it is essential reading – now more than ever – for any man who strives to rise above himself and others. Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a literary/philosophical bulldozer: it attempts to raze to the ground all extant mora...

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