¶ Pencil
← Penance: Penitent | Pencil →
RBF Definitions
“Rationalization alone, however, is not sufficient. It is not an end in itself. It must be carried through to an objective state and materialize into a completely depersonalized instrument-- a pencil. (Who knows who made the first pencil? Certainly not ‘Eberhard Faber’ or ‘Venus’.) The pencil not only facilitates communication between men, by making thought specific and objective, but also enables men cooperatively to plan and realize the building of a house, oxygen tent, flatiron, or an x-ray cabinet by virtue of the pencil’s availability. The inventor-- alive or dead-- is extraneous and unimportant; it is the pencil that carries over. Abstract thought dies with the thinker, but the mechanism was building for a long time before the moment of recognized in-vention.”
¶ Citations
- Citation and context at Rationalization Sequence (4), 1938
