Monday, September 28, 2009

Papyrus: what was, is and I wish would be...

Papyrus: Egypt, Greece, and Rome. While I was reading this article, I couldn’t help but contemplate the juxtaposition between the product “paper” then and now. In our day and age, paper is taken for granted; it’s an underappreciated necessity for the recording of ideas, theories and beliefs but not much more. But, in ancient times, it was a privilege, nay, and an honor to have a scroll that you worked for weeks to earn. A single scroll could represent the culmination of hundreds of man-hours, becoming a precious and sought after commodity. A larger amount of time went into the production of paper, just as it went into the writing upon it. In other words, the craftsmanship created it’s worth and the price of the blank scroll increased or decreased proportionately to the amount of work it took to created the medium. Now, this concept of such a simple product being worth so much because of the work put into it’s creation, not necessarily because of its intrinsic value, inspires the question: what is my homework worth? Yes, as frivolous as it may seem, the same principles could be applied to the productions of numerous papers throughout ones education and yet, they are not. I spend hours upon hours brainstorming, contemplating, studying and, indeed, creating long pieces of personal literature that hold no monetary nor bartering value yet, the final product, say, and eight pager paper analyzing and utilizing the writing styles of the late Harriet Jacobs’ The Life of a Slave Girl holds no real world credibility. This paper simply sits in a cybernetic limbo, collecting data dust despite the fact that I poured myself into every syllable I wrote. In fact, I had to pay someone else for the simple right to created this piece of literary fodder. Now, there are those who’s craftsmanship or literary prowess gleans them in come but those people have to jump through hoops, impress a board of publishers who represent only a fraction of the people to which they will inevitable sell t the product, and then, by some stroke of incredible luck, they have to hope that enough people are interested in reading their w2ork to defuse the cost of creating it in the first place. I understand that all of this is an accepted paradigm that most people, including myself, lack the interest to question. My point boils down to this: value lies in such a different place now than in ancient times that things that can bring joy solely because of the work involved barely exist anymore. Value is in how much better, bigger, faster or stronger your “stuff” is, no in what you can look at for yourself and say, “this is beautiful simply because it is; simply because it exists and a human hand and human heart made it.” The hand-on value of products hasn’t necessarily gone down in relation to price, but the demand for, the requirement for “the human touch” has all but disappeared. True, it was a necessity for humans to create papyrus by hand in those times for lack of machines but even in such a field, the artisan was valued as much as the product he created. Machinery has replace the human heart and, I must say, I wish it hadn’t. 

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