On Pencil Philosophy: Sketching out a Baha’i perspective

“Children study in the public school, Luciliio Da Souza Reis in Juliana in the Amazon region of Brazil near Manaus. Brazil. Photo: © Julio Pantoja / World Bank” Uploaded on March 27, 2008 by World Bank Photo Collection on flickr,licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic

Take a look at this pencil. You have wood from trees in California. The trees were felled with saws made from metal dug from the ground somewhere else. That metal was formed into saws and shipped to the logging camp on trucks. There were people who built shelter for the lumberjacks, who made their meals and brewed their coffee. Once the tree is down, it’s taken away using ropes, made from hemp imported from Canada. Someone had to grow the hemp, harvest it, turn it into rope and send it to the forests. The lead in the pencil is made from graphite mined from India, combined with paraffin from Mexico. The zinc used in the metal end of the pencil was perhaps mined from China or Australia. The eraser uses a little rubber used as a binding agent, but also sulfer chloride and pumice from Italy. The lacquer is made from castor bean oil, which also needed to be grown and harvested and needed technology to go from a bean to paint. If you use your imagination, you can see how millions and millions and millions of us had a hand in making this pencil. Not just this generation, but this pencil is the creation of all the generations of human beings that came before it.

http://libertarian-bahai.blogspot.com/2008/09/pursuit-of-happiness-begins-with-point.html

My  wife’s favorite pencil is made on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Montana not too far from where she grew up. She still has a few in the drawer. My wife is not the only person to wax poetic over a finely made pencil. -gw

The Blackfeet Indian is almost impossible to buy now, but I remember a time when I could go to Palace Arts in Santa Cruz and buy them by the dozen. They are beautiful: simple hardwood, lots of grain, very simply varnished. The eraser worked like a Pink Pearl, and although you could get them with a gold ferrule, my favorite version is the one with the black ferrule. It looked so minimally beautiful, matching the simple black print on the pencil body. The gold ferrule, to my eye, was a little too flashy, a little too Hollywood. I loved the black. The lead was magnificent. It was never gritty. The line was an impressive black. It did not smear. It held a point pretty well, and what’s even more impressive, I never had a Blackfeet Indian pencil turn into one of those nightmare pencils that break when you sharpen them, and the lead never fell out of the wood after sharpening, either. The lead in these pencils also would last. I bear down when I write and I can use up a Faber Castell Grip 2001 in a couple days. Not so with the Blackfeet Indian pencil. The weight of this pencil was also wonderful, not too heavy, not too light. Some newer pencils, well it feels like the wood is really dried out to the point of where the pencil lends no weight to the writing job. You have to bear down to get a line, some. The Blackfeet, well, it is equal to the task of writing.

http://www.pencilrevolution.com/2005/11/humdog-on-native-pencils/