A Zibaldone Reflection: On the Myth of the Fountain Pen
It was a Parker 51, burgundy, with a gold cap. My father gave it to me when I was twelve, the Christmas before Cory disappeared. I remember the feel of it—its weight, the smoothness of the lacquer, the way the nib glided, effortlessly inscribing my first, urgent lines of cursive into the pages of my first real notebook.
At twelve, I believed the pen conferred something upon me: a kind of initiation into the world of real writing. A myth in the Barthesian sense. The object was no longer just an object—it became a sign, a carrier of meaning, laden with the ideology of the writer as seer, as someone who, through the right instrument, could access some hidden order of things. I was not simply writing; I was becoming something, and the pen was my ticket into that becoming.
Of course, Barthes would say that the Parker 51 was a bourgeois artifact, a myth of craftsmanship, the illusion of mastery. He might note that the pen carried with it the aura of classical intellectualism, a veiled nod to a world where ink and permanence held dominion over the ephemeral. He would remind me that it wasn’t the pen but the myth of the pen that I clung to—the belief that possessing the object conferred authority, that the act of writing with this pen would shape me into someone destined for significance.
But Barthes only goes so far. The myth is not the whole story. What about the body-memory of the pen? The precise pressure of nib against paper, the sensory fact of it—the movement of the hand, the slight resistance, the way the ink seeps in and settles? What about the way the pen imposed its own rhythm upon me, slowing me down, forcing me into a certain kind of attunement? The phenomenologists would say that the pen was not merely a tool but an extension of my embodiment, a way of being-with language in a form that was as much tactile as intellectual.
Or what about the existential weight of it? I lost the pen when I was seventeen or eighteen, around the time I first read Sartre with real understanding. I remember feeling its absence like a small betrayal, as though I had lost not just the instrument but the promise it had carried—that I was a writer, that the path was set. Sartre would call this bad faith, this reliance on external symbols to confirm one’s identity. Was it ever the pen that made me a writer? Or was it always just me, clinging to the myth because I feared the truth: that nothing outside myself could confer meaning, that I would have to write with or without the emblem of authority?
And yet—A.H. Almaas might ask whether the pen had been a hole-filler, a way to compensate for a deficient emptiness. At twelve, was I already sensing some absence, some lack, and filling it with the weight of the pen, the myth of the writer? Did I mistake the object for the essence? If so, then losing it was not just the loss of an object—it was the unveiling of the hole it had covered.
But what Almaas suggests is not enough. What I came to realize, through my own inquiry I discovered the “hole” and worked through the felt-sense of loss and meaninglessness to discover was that my true worth, my identity, my talents, were never tied to the myth of the object. It was not the pen that made me a writer. Nor was it the loss of the pen that undid me. The hole was not a problem to be solved or an absence to be feared—it was the way itself, the necessary path through which I could realize my own nature, my value, my true self.
Perhaps this is what all myths do: they conceal the hole, they make the void bearable. But they also guide us to its edges, if we are willing to look.
I never found another pen that felt quite the same. And yet, I write.
(Revision, age 37, soon after beginning my study of Almaas and the path to self-realization with the Diamond Approach. My understanding of Barthes comes from my graduate studies in my twenties.)
References for Further Reflection:
- Roland Barthes, Mythologies
- Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, No Exit, Nausea
- A.H. Almaas, Diamond Heart Book 1: Elements of the Real in Man (The Theory of Holes)
Note on the Zibaldone
The Zibaldone is a personal and philosophical notebook, a space where reflections, fragments, and inquiries accumulate over time. Originating from the Italian tradition—most famously associated with the writer Giacomo Leopardi—the Zibaldone serves as a repository of thought, a place where ideas are tested, layered, and returned to in an ongoing process of discovery. In The Lost Notebooks, Isabella’s Zibaldone is not merely a journal but an evolving record of her intellectual and existential journey, a palimpsest of questions, insights, and lived experience. Each entry is part of an unfolding constellation of meaning, revisited and revised as new understanding emerges.