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| Sir Walter Scott 1771-1832 |
A couple years back, on the suggestion of an entrepreneurial friend, I read Hidden Solutions All Around You. That is the book that persuaded me to finally take cryptocurrencies seriously, and it doesn't have a word to say about cryptos in it. But I'll save that story for another blog post. For now, I'd like to share one small paragraph from the book with you. It contains the single most memorable thing in the book.
"The famous author Sir Walter Scott had been trying to compose a particular sentence all day. He finally decided to take a break and go hunting. Suddenly the right words leapt into his head. But he had no pen or paper with which to write. Afraid he would forget the sentence when he got back home, he shot a crow, plucked one of its feathers, used his hunting knife to sharpen the end into a quill, dipped it in the bird's blood and wrote the sentence down on the sleeve of his canvas hunting jacket."
As a writer myself, I can relate to the urgency of preserving a particular phrase that is in my mind, before it leaves, and is forever lost. But Sir Walter Scott surely took this to a whole new level.
I couldn't help but think that Sir Walter could have come up with a less dramatic and easier way of recording his words. A couple possible ideas did come to mind.
I'm wondering if an of you reading this might have ideas of your own?
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In the picture above, Sir Walter has a quill beside him. How appropriate. It doesn't appear to be from a crow. His handwriting was, in my opinion, atrocious...
The above letter was written by Sir Walter to William Wallace. No, not that William Wallace (of the Braveheart saga), but William Wallace, the famous Scottish mathematician—the William Wallace that developed his own mathematical theorem, which states:
If four lines intersect each other to form four triangles by omitting one line in turn, the circumcircles of these triangles have a point in common.
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Fascinating, eh? But I digress. Back to Sir Walter Scott's Dilemma.... Any alternative ideas?
Charred stick for charcoal? Although having read a number of Scott's works, I suspect this solution would not have appealed to him at all.
ReplyDeleteI usually have a pen or pencil around in the shop but no paper. Pieces of board is what I use. Or, if I need to get an idea from work to home or from home to work, I just E-mail myself at work or at home.
ReplyDeleteMy cell phone has a handy little notepad app. I never seem to have a sharpened pencil or a pen that will actually deposit ink on paper, but I carry that stupid phone in my wallet, so it's never far from me.
ReplyDeletePebbles or small rocks spelling out the key words? Locate a creek, use stick to write in wet dirt? He had a knife... lightly carve the sentence in a fallen tree/small piece of limb (with no attached bark)? Turn the sentence into a song and sing it to himself over and over? (That's pretty much the technique I have to use to remember what I went to the basement for...)
ReplyDeleteElizabeth L. Johnson said, Whoa! Joy, making a song out of it! Great idea. My husband would make songs out of scripture to teach them to our children. It worked! They even stuck in my head!
ReplyDeleteLike an earlier poster I thought of a charred stick to write on your clothing.
ReplyDeleteThe charred stick, or a piece of charcoal for writing was what I was thinking. Also, just scratching the words onto a flat rock with his knife, or another rock, might work. Thanks for the comments everyone.
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