Stronger than a sword

"Ceasar had perished from the world of men, had not his sword been rescued by his pen," Marcus Valerius Martial Pens and their owners, with a flourish here and a twist there, have shaped history, spurred revolutions, formed nations, and created great works of art, with lasting effects on the collective human psyche. Of all that are pens, perhaps the most evocative is the feather quill in an ink pot, or its more modern version, the versatile and classy fountain pen. 

The tangibility and organic feel of ink flowing onto paper through the pen, seemingly makes all fleeting thoughts a bit more concrete, and the reasoning somewhat stronger. The written word receives more scrutiny, and sometimes more flak, perhaps indicating the gravity of the act of writing. 

We may think many things and change our minds, we may say something unintended, but if committed on paper, it cannot be then justified as a fleeting action. And though today writing instruments are ubiquitous, it were not so in the not too distant past, and the instruments of thought dissemination were indeed mighty, and very important, as they remain so even today. 

Now the romantics among us use fountain pens to mark special days in those hidden diaries, perhaps to make the memories a little more concrete and longer lasting, or to reminisce once more, with our fingers tracing over the dried ink, sometime in the distant future. 

To an enthusiast, the age old charm of an elegant fountain pen is not marred by the characteristic blotting even. A few ink-bombed shirt pockets or pencil bags are nothing compared to the love of the fountain pen. The inky mess on fingers is a sigh of relief, somehow a catharsis.

In fact, to a discerning reader, the dots and the puddles of dry ink on a handwritten message could reveal much more than the written word itself - the writer's deliberation over the choice of a particular word, the anguish or desperation of a note for help, the longing of a lonely heart, somewhere far away from friends and family, all hidden in the bends and curves of the letters flowing out of an ink pen.

Many a worthy thinker has perished, but their thoughts and ideas survive, simply for their love of writing, and the tenacity of the written word, seeped into the inky depths of their writing. Many countries were won, and many borders arbitrarily drawn by simple fountain pens in just the last century. The wrath, the salve and the might in the writer's pen remains untamable. Despite the advent and spread of technology, the worth of a handwritten word, and the charm of fountain pen and its promised flourishes, have not diminished, and will not do so. As Shakespeare said, "Let there gall enough in thy ink, though thou write with a goose-pen, no matter."Or, a fountain pen! 

By Sania Aiman