Essay: The Freedom of the Pencil is My Life

Hello, this is Mao Aogarasu🌸
Today, I'd like to talk about "what is freedom of expression"

Since I started living in Europe,
I use a blue ballpoint pen.
It is the cheapest option, and its clear marks
are comfortable for studying.

But sometimes, I want to write gently.
I use a pencil.

From junior high school through university, I loved using a mechanical pencil.
When I was in elementary school, what I used was a pencil.


The wood material was clearly
something that had been alive.

That thing that had been alive
is whittled away
to leave behind the will of us who are living.

Before pencil sharpeners existed,
I used a Higonokami knife to sharpen them.
When I was in elementary school,
I was taught how to use a Higonokami in class.

It was cumbersome and felt like it might cut my hand,
so I was a little anxious.

Now, I think about that anxiety.

We whittle down wood that was once alive
to write the characters of our own living selves.

To carve out the words of me, who is living now,
I thought it was only natural
that there would be a risk of cutting my own living hand.

Is it something you want to say
even at the cost of injuring your own fingers,
even at the cost of whittling away another life, that of a tree?

The equivalence of life.
I thought that words
should not be something that comes so easily.



We talk about freedom of expression, but
perhaps it only exists
because of this balance of our own lives.

Nowadays, with a pencil sharpener, I can easily sharpen it without risking the writer's life,
grinding away only the life of the other.

In that moment,
the pencil becomes a mere tool. It becomes matter.

A mechanical pencil doesn't even need sharpening.
It just pushes the lead out.
Even if the lead breaks, no sap comes out.
No blood comes out either.

And so, the sense of living that we have,
the pain,
is lost from the trivialities of daily life,
a loneliness.

What is modern loneliness?
Perhaps it is the loneliness where we are
isolated from life itself.

It is somewhat like
being loved right after birth, but then,
one day, your parents don't come to pick you up from kindergarten,

and you spend the rest of your time alone,
a loneliness like that.

I think of a baby elephant
welcomed into a zoo for the first time.

The loneliness of the zoo.
Because a world without the feeling of living creatures is lonely,
and because it is frustrating,
we interact online.

But modern people, who have a thin sense of what it means to be a living creature,
do not know how to interact with living things.
That is why there is slander.

Perhaps our souls are crying
due to a lack of love for life.
But that is also
the deforestation
that we have discarded for the sake of 'convenience'.

It is good to become convenient.
What is lost cannot be helped.

So, rather than saying we should
reclaim what was lost,

perhaps we should be thinking about
where the new soul is,
and where the life of the modern age is.

To such an extent, the speed of the world's development
through mechanization has exceeded
the 'speed of the evolution of living things'.

To the point where we are losing ourselves.

There is life on the other side of the screen.
What is life?

The smooth, pleasant-to-touch screen of a smartphone.
When you tap, there is no pain at the tip of your finger.

The clacking keyboard
allows you to easily erase mistakes with a single key.
I don't even use an eraser
to acknowledge that I've made a mistake.

The sharp tip of a pencil

That clumsy sharpness
that rounds off so quickly,
I love it.

The heart
becomes rounded as it writes.

Every time the pencil gets shorter, you become me.

I think of the number of yous that have become me.

The number of lives.

The beauty of a starry sky
might be that it cannot be counted.

I traced back a little to see where this feeling of "the more I write, the more beautiful it becomes," which I cherish now, comes from.

What are rights?
Living in France, where there are many demonstrations, I think about this from time to time.

Thank you for reading ☺️🌸
Let's become beautiful today too 🍀