A pen went scribbling along. When it tried to write love, it broke.

WONDER WITHOUT WILLPOWER

Love’s way becomes a pen sometimes writing g-sounds like gold or r-sounds

like tomorrow in different calligraphy
styles sliding by, darkening the paper

Now it’s held upside down, now beside
the head, now down and on to something

else, figuring. One sentence saves
an illustrious man from disaster, but

fame does not matter to the split tongue
of a pen. Hippocrates knows how the cure

must go. His pen does not. This one
I am calling pen, or sometimes flag,

has no mind. You, the pen, are most sanely
insane. You cannot be spoken of rationally.

Opposites are drawn into your presence but
not to be resolved. You are not whole

or ever complete. You are the wonder
without willpower going where you want.

How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger?

To hold a pen is to be at war.

I jotted the name down mentally on that tattered notepad I call a memory. The pen skipped.

The pen is the tongue of the mind.

Obviously, nothing new has happened in a manner of speaking. This morning, at a quarter past eight, as I was leaving the Hôtel Printania to go to the library, I tried to pick up a piece of paper lying on the ground and didn't succeed. That's all, and it isn't even an event. Yes, but, to tell the whole truth, it made a profound impression on me: it occurred to me that I was no longer free.

I had got this far, and was thinking of what to say next, and as my habit is, I was pricking the paper idly with my pen. And I thought how, between one dip of the pen and the next, time goes on, and I hurry, drive myself, and speed toward death. We are always dying. I while I write, you while you read, and others while they listen or stop their ears, they are all dying.

As will so often be the case when a men has a pen in his hand. It is like a club or sledge-hammer, — in using which, either for defence or attack, a man can hardly measure the strength of the blows he gives.

If indeed “the pen is mightier than the sword,” the time has come as never before that the wielders of the pen belonging to the race which is so tortured and outraged, should take serious thought and purposeful action. The blood, tears and groans of hundreds of the murdered cry to you for redress; the lamentations, distress and want, of numberless widows and orphans appeal to you to do the only thing which can be done — and which is the first step toward revolution of every kind — the creation of a healthy public sentiment.