Clearly outmatched, the fountain pen struggles back to its feet. "This can't be the end," she cries.
Most of her friends are long gone. Only she's left. She's feeling frail and alone in a world that has abandoned her.
Quietly she slips into her corner, where nobody can see her. To reminisce.
It's keyboard city. They're loud and brash. Care nothing about delicacy. About art. It's about banging stuff out. Repetitively hitting key after key. As though there was meaning.
There is no meaning.
Only production. Is this what we were meant for? Even they're envious of one another. Looking at each other, but not seeing. They're only interested in themselves. "How much do you know about me?" "Let me tell you another story, yes, about me." Pompous braggarts they are. The noise they make is completely unintelligible. It's unintelligent. It's pure nonsense. They're not thinking. They're too hurried to look where they're going. Like clones. This work looks exactly like that work. The cacophony masks the underlying mediocrity.
There is no meaning.
Meanwhile, in her little corner, the fountain pen remembers how it used to be. It wasn't like this. Mont Blanc's Sheaffer's Lamy's, Cross' and sometimes they'd even let Parker's hang out with them at the cafe. There was no competition. Just mutual admiration. They'd argue into the night about serifs and the beauty of the bowed upstrokes of lowercase letters. The majesty of uppercase, how sprinkling a few here and there brought order to the parchment. And soon Caran d'Ache, Faber-Castell and Waterman arrived. And they looked at each other. And all they saw was good.
And there was meaning.
But the writing was on the wall when the Biro arrived. That was the beginning of the end. The end of beauty. Those ball point pens were the first attack. No fineness. Scratching along uncontrollably on the page. Discarded after a short life. Expendable. Having nothing to live for, they drank themselves to exhaustion. But they've managed to survive. Somehow, they've managed to slip behind the masses of keyboards. Like their serfs. Their servants. Their lackeys. They believe it's a partnership. But the keyboard doesn't even notice that they're there.
And still there is no meaning.
The majestic fountain pen refuses to be anyone's slave. She will bow down to nobody. She's come to the realisation that everything ends. In the circle of life. It's good to have lived. It will be good to be remembered. This is a world she does not care for. Everything ends.
Everything.
One day she will be relegated to the annals of an art to be forgotten. Displayed in a glass case, in a museum. Where children will ask what she is. And with the impatience of youth, wonder why anyone would painstakingly use such an object. Like a scribe in ancient times, laboriously mixing pigment and using a reed to record a single stroke.
But she is also well aware, that the keyboard will also die out. They do not know it. Laughing and polluting the world with their noise. Meaningless noise. It is not that the knowledge in the world doubles every year. It's the noise.
She turns around, seeking the only person who cares.
And I am there.
