Dear Unbended,
A hobby is nothing to be ashamed of, so I wish you wouldn’t write so shrinkingly about your own. I have ways to unravel, too. One in particular springs to mind.
It began with a book plucked mindlessly out from a row of old cloth-bound books with empty spines. I had no expectations. The book I chose didn’t raise any either, as it wound up being The Sign of the Four, a Sherlock Holmes story, and I’ve never felt much of anything at the sound of his name. But before I could slide the book back into its place I spotted the words “Printed in Gregg Shorthand” and paused to take a look inside. A few minutes later I was out of the must. The book was mine.
I had never thought of shorthand at all and could just as easily have left this foxed-over book alone on its little-browsed shelf. It was only by a whim that I didn’t and found my trustiest hobby. Others might go in for woodturning or crochet, but to me these are no less stuffy than my tachygraphy. Sure, there are no shorthand circles, shops, gifts to be made, or bees, but I can still scribble away with a will in the sun.
The Sign of the Four didn’t keep me too long, and even Gregg Shorthand was only one stop on the way to Callendar’s Cursive, Clive’s Linear, and several more, all easy enough to find thanks to library scans. I had no interest in becoming a spare-time stenographer who could take down speech in a flurry of pencil-marks, or even to hurtle over my own ideas with a running pen more quickly than I could ever type them. What I enjoyed most was how graceful it felt to write down a whole phrase in three unruffled strokes, together with the care it can take (even after much practice) to chisel the full sense back out of a page of cagey, homographic outlines.
Best of all, shorthand was something I could sit down to knowing it would never hound me out of my seat. It was from the first—still is—a rare untroubled act. Why that should be I can only guess, and I’d doubtless fall flat on my face with the guesswork. No matter the reason, shorthand invokes no possible end—no finish, no aim. There is nothing to be flubbed, found, or forgotten. No one will ever ask after it; even I’ll leave me alone. For many years I’ve walked gingerly among my stray thoughts and restlessness, treating their stings as threats to life, and there are many small things I set out to do for myself—cooking, reading, art—that will sometimes serve as fertile ground for restless shoots. Shorthand is one of the only things in my life that never does. It is always (at long last) restful.
I could go on and give my opinions on positional writing, the handling of the English rhotic, precision in marking vowels both medial and on the ends,—but to me a hobbyist’s opinion is a private matter, which like a new-risen idea should not be hurried into words, where it would miss the warm air that inflates it half to bursting in the speaker’s mind and appear instead exactly as it is, a sadly wispy thing.
Yours truncatedly,
Mitchell Cooper