The Paper Avalanche and the Pursuit of Whimsy
To write is human
It is a common plaint about bureaucracies: they produce a lot of paper. Mountains and mountains of it. Some of it survives long enough to delight nerdy historians. As an ancient historian, I’ve long appreciated, in particular, the rich documentary archive of Ptolemaic Egypt—all those rental and buying agreements, prenups, inventory reports, village police complaints (cattle theft was a real problem), party plans, and so much more; scraps of papyrus giving us glimpses of ordinary lives lived well or not so well, over two millennia ago. Even as we try to relegate as much of this sort of paperwork as possible to the digital medium today, much actual paper still abounds.
In fact, I’m reading this delightful book right now about a bureaucracy for which all of this applies, but substitute paper with clay tablets!
But, I contend, no bureaucracy in world history has ever come even close to the volume of paper consumed daily by children of a certain age.
There are homemade newspapers delivered to my husband’s desk each day (sometimes both morning and evening editions); a “Wanted” poster of my husband that a child made when dad had upset him is taped to one wall; circus and theater program ad drawings on another wall; lists of words the kindergartener knows how to write proudly executed on paper after paper after paper—complete with flowers, curlicues, and illuminated manuscript-worthy art beyond; a museum of paper installations on the wall along the stairs; and hand-drawn and cut-out paper dolls absolutely everywhere.
For a while, the child who is now in her paper doll era was all about making paper Faberge eggs, but this phase has concluded. We still go through scotch tape faster than we go through orange juice. One year, a child gave me as a birthday present a large jar of homemade confetti that he had worked for weeks to cut all by himself. The ultimate labor of love, three-year-old style.
This reminds me, there are two pairs of kitchen scissors that we keep in a designated location, on a ledge, where I can access them when I need to. Both are missing at the moment. I guess someone is working on a craft. Yet again. (As long as the individual in question doesn’t resort to cutting hair…)
In a recent post, I reflected on the difficult equation in my house: the volume of books far exceeds the volume of bookshelf space. I reflected, in the process, though, on an encouraging and important truth: To read is human. This is a sequel of sorts, considering a related and no less important truth: To write (and to do all these other crafty things involving paper) is human. Why? Because of a certain quality that only humans can possess—and machines cannot replicate or access. I am thinking here of whimsy.
The Cup of Nestor and the Whimsy of Writing
In the mid-8th century BC, a (likely inebriated) guest at a dinner party in Pithekoussai, a Greek colony on a small island off the Bay of Naples, made the incredibly rude decision to deface one of his host’s dinner cups by scratching a little ditty on it. The result is one of the earliest (if not THE earliest) surviving examples of writing in the Greek alphabet.
We know nothing else about this party, mind you. We just have the defaced cup—an archaeological artifact. The inscription is scratched onto the cup from right to left.
The inscription says (Christopher Faraone’s translation):
I am the cup of Nestor good for drinking.
Whoever drinks from this cup, desire for beautifully
crowned Aphrodite will seize him instantly.
Just as we know nothing else about the party, we also know nothing else about the unruly scribe. The name historians have bestowed on this artifact—the Cup of Nestor—comes from the first two words in this inscription, in which the cup is “speaking” out, identifying itself in the first person.
What do we make of a document like this one? On the one hand, we are clearly dealing with vandalism. Look, if I invite you into my home and serve you a really nice dinner on the nicest dishes I own, I would be quite upset if you then took a nice cup or a plate and decided to scratch a message on it!
And yet, on the other hand, since I’m not the unfortunate host, I can also recognize something else that this cup displays: there is a beautiful whimsy to writing! And in this case, the ditty refers to the Iliad—Nestor and his renowned golden cup are mentioned there. Our scribe takes an epic passage and makes it his own in this joke involving a not-so-epic cup. Again, whimsy.
So often we forget this aspect of the writing life. In fact, that is an insufficiently acknowledged threat AI poses to writing—this erasure of whimsy, of delight that has been a part of writing since its earliest days!
And it is this whimsy that characterizes all of the writing that my children do, as they generate staggering piles of paper all over this house (help!).
Writing, just as other forms of creativity, is a gift. It is a joy. It is not a chore, although cleaning up homemade confetti sometimes is. But if AI would like to dust my bookshelves or organize my children’s tottering stacks of papers, I would welcome it.
Elsewhere This Week: Thing 1 and Thing 2
Thing 1: My review of Bret Lott’s, Gather the Olives, a memoir of life and travel in Israel—through food! It’s a beautiful book about searching for peace in the Holy Land.
Thing 2: In my latest for Front Porch Republic, I argue that while we should spend time reading alone (and listening to audiobooks alone), we should make sure that we also read together with other people—family, friends, church, etc.
Are you reading Dan Williams’s New Substack?
My favorite American historian has finally jumped on the Substack bandwagon! If you would like to keep up with his work, you can subscribe:
Here’s to dads like Dan with a sense of humor