Unplugged tech: the quality of sharpness

What you need to know about cartoonist and artisanal pencil-sharpener David Rees is that he’s completely serious. He’s not twee or quirky or quatschy or eccentric�no, not at all.

Artisanal pencil-sharpening is about that lost morning in America when the pencil-sharpener still wielded his blade…

Under a spreading chestnut-tree
The pencil sharpener stands;
The sharp, a finer man is he,
With loving, careful hands;
And the sinews of his slender arms
Are strong as rubber bands.

His hair is crisp, and black, and long,
His eyes are not so blue;
His brow is gray with honest lead,
His apron clean and new,
And he looks the whole world in the face,
For his credit cards are due.
�Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Village Pencil Sharpener,” 1841

Perhaps you know “I, Pencil,” the famous essay by Leonard Read, in which Pencil himself traces the work of the market in the miracle of his birth. Arguing that “not a single person on the face of this earth knows how” to make a pencil, the eponymous writing implement describes the magic by which the spirit of industry, autonomous and implacable, takes up its many tasks: the felling of lumber, the mining of graphite and clay, the manufacturing and the shipping…

The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society’s legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men will respond to the Invisible Hand. This faith will be confirmed. I, Pencil, seemingly simple though I am, offer the miracle of my creation as testimony that this is a practical faith, as practical as the sun, the rain, a cedar tree, the good earth.

All very well, Mr. Adam Smith. But the Invisible Hand isn’t going to sharpen your pencil for you�and neither is Ayn Rand. So maybe it’s time for the pencil sharpeners to unite with the three-hole-punchers and the chalkboard-eraser-bangers. You’re needed everywhere, from the village chestnut tree, to the front of the class, to the ocean liner ploughing the waves. It’s morning in America.

[via the Los Angeles Times]