Fingers on pens.

Many months ago I commented on how Daughtermouse held her pen. I read in the Guardian today that undergraduates are finding it difficult writing exam essays because they find it so tiring. The accompanying photo shows the same mangled abomination of fingers and thumb, which is apparently causing fatigue and even calluses on fingers. There’s something symptomatic about youngsters being capable typists, a skill no one has ever taught them, yet unable to hold a pen properly, which presumably some one has tried to teach them somewhere along the line. The result is profoundly inelegant. Elegance is a word that has become subtly corrupted in recent decades. It’s now connected with the outdated puritanical style of a dowager duchess rather than ‘a refined quality of gracefulness’ and ‘ingenious simplicity.’ There is something Murdockian about their awkward clutching of a pen that owes more to the paranoid strangling of a recalcitrant chicken than a flowing pas de deux of man and implement. Murdockian because all he know is the plundering use of his surroundings, his fingers on the jugular of all he surveys. This gross manipulation is reflected in this pen holding. It allows no artistry. I only hope it isn’t carried through to what is written into clunky ham-fisted prose that simply fulfil the word count. It’s not that it’s 2,000 words long, it’s that every word counts, just like each individual stitch in an elegant tapestry.