Empty Pages

Here is a lovely essay by Jonathan Safran Foer about blank pages. It begins with a friend sending him the top page from a stack of typewriter paper Isaac Bashevis Singer left behind when he died, the next page, presumably, that Singer would have used. (Was Singer still writing when he died? I met him once. I was maybe 12. He told me I had beautiful eyes.)

Foer becomes obsessed with the sheet of paper, and then, more generally, with the idea of the blank page and all the potential it holds. He writes to other authors, asking them to send him the next sheet of paper they would have written on, and there follows a lovely description of all the pieces of paper he receives, culminating in a sheet of Freud's stationery which a guide gives him at the Freud house in London.

This is the kind of writing I can fall right into: the specific descriptions, the symbolic value of the material object, the touch of sentimental cliche in the blank sheet of paper as metaphor for the rest of our lives (is sentimental cliche redundant? I don't think so, but I'm not sure). Except, I'm a bit skeptical throughout, and my skepticism is confirmed by a sentence in the next to last paragraph of the essay: But I can remember, as if it were yesterday, turning on my laptop, knowing that I was about to start my first novel--the moment before life wrote on me.

Sure, some of us still write on paper, but most of us write right into the pixilated evanescence of the computer screen, where a word can be deleted as easily as it is written (I've deleted more than you can imagine as I've written this post, and I'm not even writing that carefully). By the time the words print out on paper, they are fully reified, several steps removed, by the mechanisms of technology, from us (where once the hand held the pen that touched the paper, now the fingers tap the keys that send the words to the screen from whence they disassemble through the printer cord to reassemble in the printer and be spit out, via the ink cartridge, onto the page; that the the hand also wields the mouse, or in this case taps the touchpad, to hit the Print button hardly affects the disconnect between hand, word, and page). This doesn't erase the power of the metaphor, but the injection of unacknowledged nostalgia does increase its sentimentality, perhaps too much for me.