Beautiful handwriting is learned and performed like dance. As long as you guide your movements to accord with a visual outcome, or execute your movements explicitly step-by-step you will write like a child.

Visual reproductions and execution of algorithms are means to cultivating tacit kinaesthetic knowledge. They are guides, and at each stage on the way visual and algorithmic considerations have varying degrees of emphasis.

Only with sustained effort can one internalize the visual and algorithmic elements and learn to write with spontaneous grace.

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Lately, I’ve been obsessed with fountain pens.

A fountain pen is not a tool a person uses to deposit ink on a surface. That is what a technical pen is for.

A fountain pen records a hand’s motion over a surface. It is a kind of seismograph that produces an ink trace of physical movement. Different pens and different nibs inspire and emphasize different kinds of movements. The movements are primary; the line follows. And the line reveals the source and the nature of the movement.

In my hand, a fountain pen reveals total gracelessness. I have enormous control over my writing hand. I can place ink precisely where I want it to be. But my hand has very little kinaesthetic intelligence of its own. It receives commands and reports sensations.

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Most people think like children.

They use their minds to produce some sort of outward effect, or they execute intellectual algorithms they were trained to produce as children.

It takes sustained effort to think with spontaneous grace.

It takes sustained effort to live gracefully.

Life feels most like living when it acquires grace.