Free Assorted Prose by John Updike

gave way to an ill-engraved gallery of lifeless mugs, but let it pass, let it pass.) We liked the old pens; the ink flowed from the nibs dark and luminous, the faint scratching wasan agreeable accompaniment to composition, the cork holder felt airy and suave between the fingers, and even the most abject handwriting took on an angular distinction. We are thinking especially of the square-tipped nib, though the bowl-shaped, too, induced more real penmanship than any flow-forever, jet-styled pen. True, some post-office pens were splayed, split, and encrusted, and some wells dry, but seeing a herd of scrawny cattle we do not curse the suffering animals. Few people are fit to tend a cow, and fewer are competent to hold a pen. To seize, to press, to frown and crush was for many the exercise of their certificated literacy.
    The pens, like modern poetry and Dean Acheson, were abused in a tone of impregnable smugness. We once overheard, in a Vermont post office, a woman rest the case for democracy on their wretchedness. “Compare these pens with the bank’s,” she instructed the child with her. “The Post Office is a state-run monopoly; you take what it gives you. The banks operate in a competitive system, and have to please their customers.” The bank, as will happen in Vermont, was right across the street, and we found there the ball-point instruments usual in local temples of deposit, insultingly chained to their tuberous sockets. We hope the child’s conversion to the free way of life did not hinge on this lesson alone. Ball-point pens began as a vulgar novelty for subaqueous scribes. The industry’s publicists have shown great vigor, and thanks to them ink may become as quaint a liquid to the next generation as kerosene is to this, but their product still unrolls a pale, dull line, whose total lack of the thin-and-thick elements that quicken calligraphy is not redeemed by an erratic splotchiness.
    Perhaps the inverse ratio between beauty and efficiency is rigid and not to be bucked. The candle was a graceful, ardent, and numinous method of illumination, but fluorescent tubes in gawky casings are no doubt easier, in the optometrical sense, on the eyes. We consent to hideous brightness. However, it seems that Progress, in order to maintain the appearance of itself, must sacrifice to the dumb god Era its own best fruits. The roll-top desk was the most functional desk ever devised; Functionalism swept it away. The customary resident of that desk, the dip pen with metal nib, retained the eloquence of the goose quill and saved the geese. When Summerfield moved, the geese stood idly by.
    March 1958
    P OSTMASTER G ENERAL S UMMERFIELD is that rare combination, a man of ideas and a man of action. No sooner did he conceive of red-white-and-blue mailboxes than they twinkled from every street corner. One minute he learned that dogs bite postmen; the next, he was hurling thunderbolts of excommunication at impenitent owners. Congress dared balk at budget time last spring; Summerfield declared Saturday a legal holiday. And, with a divine imperiousness, he stamped his own Christmas cards with four-cent stamps. In view of this dynamic record, we have no hope that he will be frustrated in his scheme to impose two billion dollars’ worth of improvement upon post offices across the nation. We mourn, nevertheless. It used to be that in any town from Bangor to Fresno the heartsick stranger could find honesty, industry, piety, and free reading matter in two places: the post office and the public library. Since Andrew Carnegie couldn’t be everywhere, in many hamlets the post office was the sole repository of our traditions. It rises before the imagination now: the village post office, with its quaint grilled windows, its ink-stained floors, its hideous orange writing shelf, its curiously nibbled blotters, its “wanted” posters for Dillinger and Aaron Burr, and its twin letter slots dividing the world into two great halves, “Local” and