George Whitman, the enigmatic extraordinary figure who once threw away his daughter’s attempt to modernize his paper world. The owner of what we now know of as Shakespeare and Company, having handed his business over to his daughter Sylvia, once had stumbled upon a truly horrifying discovery inside his bookshop. The cash register – oh, no! Oh heaven preserve us from the awful cyber-interference into our quiet, intelligible, pristine world of letters, ink, and delightfully complex processes that could, in reality, be accomplished with just two taps on a keyboard.

He folded her innovations into a paper boat and sent it off on an endless, dreary journey along the Seine (he threw the cash register out into the lake). And to be fair, I don’t like ticket counters either; I understood his intention very well. I sympathise with his quirks and the resilience he holds against the modern world. 

I imagine him using paper planes for travel, paper cups for coffee, and a paper bed to tuck himself into every night like a seed inside an origami swan. His mind could’ve been a bird. His ideas, as light as they could be, would dance inside his mind like confetti. And as he woke up, his sleepy thoughts would piece themselves together like a mosaic into prose, which he would recite in his head like a counting rhyme: 

And one, and two, and three, and four, and one, and two and we are one.. one of….one of the… 

He left his world as it is. I can only wonder how the rest of his day might have unfolded after learning what artificial intelligence was. Words, once slipped beneath our pillows while we were deep asleep, had to pass through a quadrillion inner sieves before becoming prose, filtering the word from the poetry, to only now be artificially put into our work. Words that weren’t even ours to begin with. Words that we don’t own. 

I am reminded of Walter Benjamin’s sentence from One-Way Street: “There is nothing more wretched than a truth expressed in the same form in which it was thought.” I think of the hundreds of thousands of inner movements a thought has to make inside the head before it can appear on paper.

Writing is a muscular spasm that begins with the laughter of letters living inside the writer. They tickle the body; I begin to laugh. My letters descend down the chimney, striving upward, toward the open air, toward freedom. They think of the softness and tenderness of an untouched white sheet of paper. That sheet is their God.

I think about how they conspire with one another, asking:

“Do you believe in literature after death?”

“No, I’m more of an atheist. What about you?”

“I do. I believe that after I die, I’ll become part of a stanza in some little girl’s diary.”

And, making their way toward the page as if chosen by a counting rhyme, they find themselves in the alphabet, in fiction, in one of Leo Tolstoy’s works, in a nursery rhyme, and some even in the Bible, the Torah, the Quran. And if a letter wasn’t particularly obliging in its lifetime – to hell with it! Let it work off its punishment in one of the bureaucratic documents required to apply for a European visa from some fifteenth-world country.

And just think: this entire living world of letters, their entire journey, is brutally strangled by tens of thousands of wires connected to the soulless hunk of metal we now call our paper – the computer. Letters wither under the crosshairs of our world. I cannot understand it.

I am finishing this in a hurry on my way to the theatre. I’ll leave it as it is. I hope the letters won’t betray me and rearrange themselves into an order different from the one I put them in.

And yet I remember a quiet rustling beneath the writing desk: something fiddling with the keyboard, spilling ink onto the floor, leaving behind a soft mess by morning. Sometimes I even think I can hear their quiet, cautious conversation.

M casts a sly glance at the letter D.

“Do you like being in this text?” – D asks.

“I suppose so. The only thing that upsets me is that you and I ended up in an online document instead of on paper. I keep thinking about the frailty of that thin layer of wood beneath the pressure of a pen. Like a knife against skin. But no such luck: you and I are in a strange space woven out of 1s and 0s and 0s and 1s. But you know, I don’t like numbers.” – said M.

“I understand. But I like the text. At least, for once, someone finally talked about us.”