A couple years ago I bought a manual typewriter. I was in a slump in my writing and seeking some kind of creative, esoteric reboot, I suppose. There were things I wanted to write that I didnโt necessarily want online, or on the nebulous Cloud, or even on a hard drive, and so I thought perhaps going completely offline would offer me a modicum of freedom to explore my deepest innermost thoughts.
I found a guy on Craigslist and met him in a West Philly parking lot, handed him a hundred sixty dollars in cash, and came home with a pristine, aqua-colored 1960s Smith Corona portable typewriter. No electricity required. I had complete freedom to type in a crowded park or on top of a mountain with no restriction and nothing required but a few sheets of copy paper, my fingers, and my thoughts.
This is how writers have been writing for years before the word processor. If it was good enough for Flannery OโConnor and Jack Kerouac, maybe there was some hope for me to connect with that past.
Iโd like to say I use it more than I do, but aside from some journaling, letters I would type and mail to friends, and โfirst-draftโ brain dumps, the typewriter has mostly now become a dรฉcor piece in the house. In more ironic moments, I would snap photos of the written pages with my iPhone and text them to people who I wanted to share them with. But having written my whole life on a PC or laptop, it was a big leap to retrain my fingers and brain to type in a linear wayโno cut and paste, no autocorrectโฆjust inked typeset on a blank page. In a digital age, the typewriter is a practical dinosaur of limited usefulness, I have come to admit to myself.
I tried the same thing with some digital cameras I purchased (including a Polaroid), to try to put more friction between myself and the phone. The reasoning was sound, but these steps into a past that has been left behind (and arguable, by most, for good reason) was more analog fetish than building up an armory for some kind of anti-tech โrevolution.โ The realization was deflatingโthe world had moved on, and trying to keep such instruments of the past alive had made me a quirky amateur curator, not a guerilla rebel in the fight against Big Tech. I keep looking over my shoulder, hoping others will join in, but I find myself painfully alone.
I recently came across a curious word the Welsh use to describe a kind of spiritual homesickness or nostalgia for a place that no longer is. Hiraethโwhich has no direct English translationโderives from the root hir (“long”) and aeth (“sorrow” or “grief”). For the Welsh, this term embodies a โwhat could have beenโ for Wales prior to English colonization.
Though hiraeth is a geographic term unique to the Welsh and their land, there is an existential layer that I think can apply to people my age; Gen Xers who excitedly rode ashore on the boat of technology in their teens, but who have a muscle memory of an age before the usurpation of analog culture at the hands of a technological hegemony.
Ours was a social generationโgetting wind of a party was through word of mouth typically. Lit mags and โzines were printed by hand. Music was experienced for the first time in the record store with a tape deck or CD and a pair of headphones. You kept your important phone numbers in your memory, or a small book you kept in your wallet. People interacted with one another, if nothing else, to fight the ever-present boredom of summers. When you traveled to a new place, you didnโt know much about it until you arrived; the sense of adventure was palatable.
Now in my mid-forties, it is painfully obvious that these longings for a pre-tech era like those I just described is an old-man-yells-at-cloud scenario. โDad is โunkโโ my Gen Z kids quip, playfully mocking me with a truncated slang label of “uncle”; that Iโm older, aging, out of touch. And yet my childrenโs generation is the most anti-social on record, preferring to stay home and isolate rather than date, go out, or socialize IRL.
But the longing, the unnamed sorrow for a place that no longer is has been following me like a lapdog since COVID. Itโs not about returning to a surface-level 1990s ethos, or even nostalgia for childhoodโitโs trying to have a conversation with a stranger on the bus and being side-eyed like youโre the urban creep. Itโs mailing a letter written on your typewriter and knowing you made someoneโs day with an honest-to-goodness longform note, and knowing youโll never get one in return because, hey, txt.
Itโs AI being ram-rodded into every nano fabric of oneโs existence, whether you want it there or not. Itโs the sober realization that the only time anyone rings your doorbell is if they are trying to sell you solar panels, and even a phone call out of the blue for a spontaneous meet-up or a short road trip is not going to happen.
The fact that I havenโt given up yet, why I hold out hope that things like this might still occur in middle age while working and raising a family, is deluded at worst, and at best, kitsch.
Maybe this hiraeth explains the draw of the Latin Mass (which we attend), for instance, and the allure of things like homesteading and the Catholic Land Movementโa yearning for something lost, like a home or neighborhood you miss but one you never really grew up in. Or maybe itโs simply a manifestation of a longing for Heaven, something written in our spiritual DNAโa place we can only imagine and yearn for while here on earth.
In any event, as the typewriter sits adjacent to my laptop as I type this article, I sip on a vodka tonic and find myself with a heavy yet nebulous kind of long-grief I canโt put a finger on; not at home in the world in which I now find myself having to inhabit, and unable to find my way back to the place in which I used to live.
Photo by Luke Witter on Unsplash
