Not carved in stone
“I’ll just pencil that in,” you might say.
It’s easy to do, to pencil something in. Isn’t there always a pencil lying around? The implication is that the pencil and paper record is more lasting than a thought and can act as a reminder. The date in the day planner or the item on the shopping list will not be overlooked. On the other hand, the great thing about using a pencil is that it’s easy to erase.
If there is some reason to doubt someone will be able to meet an actual commitment, a pencilled in appointment reserves the time and neither party will book another until the engagement can be confirmed (and so, presumably, written in ink). If for some reason the rendezvous cannot happen (or the grocery item is no longer required), the pencil mark is removed with the swipe of an eraser. Change is more easily wrought than when you pen something down.
Pencil does leave a mark and the marks can be quite enduring. We have some pencil marks made by the children when they were small. Even pencil marks reveal a lot of detail about the person a child is and gives some indication of the character the child will become. Even in pencil, marks bear unique, individual features that are as identifiable as posture, gait, and habits of speech. As identifiable as they are, signatures in pencil can be erased with little difficulty, save for any indentations, which may be made in the paper.
This must be why, when a signature is required, so is a pen and ink. While a signature made with any implement or medium is uniquely individual, traces of ink can persist for centuries. I realize this is not always so — a local gas station gives receipts printed with an ink that can become invisible while the receipt hides in the darkness of my wallet for less than two weeks. On the whole, though, we can safely say we have inked records, which are still legible after centuries.
We tend to think of marks carved in stone as being the most permanent of all. It’s true there are some inscribed stones in the world which were written on more than a thousand years ago. And it takes more effort than the mere rub of an eraser to erode marks on stone. However, here in Nova Scotia, the rub of rain over granite is blurring records “written in stone.” The headstone of one of my great-grandmothers (buried in the 1920s) is almost illegible while a letter (written in ink) from another great-grandmother is still as clear and easy to read as when it was written in 1902.
I think there was some hope that things written electronically would be more permanent. To our dismay, it seems what is written on the worldwide web may be unerasable. Why is that so when we’ve all experienced the trauma of a disc that will not release its information or a computer that expires?