The Twilight of the Doodle

Over the last week or so, I've been taking a few hours here and there to whittle away at the amassed detritus of decades stored in our home.  Down in the unfinished area of our basement, the shelves that line the walls in the workroom and the utility room are packed full of the residue of life.  An entire box was packed high with stacks of daily preschool paintings produced by my now-adult sons.   Elsewhere were boxes going all the way back to my own childhood.  A drawing of my family that I made in fifth grade.  A painting I made in preschool.  Letters from high school friends, back when we wrote letters to one another that could be kept.  Letters from family members long passed.  That sort of thing.

As I sorted through and discarded well-worn high school papers and faded college course notebooks, I marveled at a time when such things were all done by hand.  When was the last time I wrote an entire page of text, actually wrote it, hand and pen to paper?  Or wrote a letter in my marginally legible cursive?  It's been a bit.

Even more striking than my now mostly unfamiliar penmanship were the margins, because the margins of class-notes and tests and letters alike were awash in doodles.  At a moment of distraction in class, which for scatter-brained-me there were many, I would draw.  There were geometric patterns and abstract sworls of texture.  There were faces, and scenes, and little cartoons drawn to amuse both myself and nearby classmates.  

When the mind wandered, it doodled.  It was just something that one did, and it was hardly idiosyncratic to my own modestly artistic self.  It was a common thing, a nearly universal thing, just part of being a student or a note-taker or a diarist in the late 20th century.  Interspersed in our class notes and our meeting minutes would be the images and patterns.  In that, we were carrying on a tradition that goes back as far as pen and paper, back to times medieval, when marginalia were an integral part of our thinking processes.

And I wondered: does anyone doodle anymore?  I don't, not really.

The shift in media form from notebooks to laptops completely changed the whole dynamic of writing.  I mean, sure, there are touch screens and drawing programs, but honestly?  It's an entirely different world.  If we're distracted, there are casual gaming apps to fill our time, or a bottomless stream of reels to scroll through mindlessly.  Through the "miracle" of bottomless connectivity, most of our fallow moments have been monetized and gamified into functional oblivion, as whimsy and creativity have been supplanted.

Some out there, no doubt, might bring a pad with them for the specific purpose of doodling.  Others have chosen to return to pen and paper, intentionally rediscovering handwriting as a mnemonic device.  But most of us do not.

As with so many of the tradeoffs in this brave new world, it feels like a lessening, as we forget a thing whose value we didn't recognize.