Nick Lyons on Throwing Away the Typewriter

Seven years ago in The New York Times, Nick Lyons wrote a short essay in which he asked, in response to be forced into the computer age by his kids, “Is faster better?” “I liked its responsiveness to my touch, even the pain it bred in my shoulders when I typed for too many hours. I liked to correct my words by hand and even retype a slew of pages, whereby I often found more that I wanted to be corrected. Didn’t the heart, not the machine — to paraphrase Quintilian — make the eloquence? I wanted less speed, not more.”