Calligraphy Lesson by Mikhail Shishkin Read Free Book Online Page A

some lapidary cursive but, say, an elegant, bubbly Rondo, in blurred letters that repeat, but the verdict is in a littera fractura with flourishes, or Gothic logjams, or Batard, or Coulé, or whatever strikes your fancy, one page like this, another like that. Even if you only write one word, to say nothing of a page, make it harmony itself, so that its regularity and beauty offset that whole crazy world, that whole caveman mindset. Why just today they convicted someone who had poisoned her husband, a drunkard and a brawler, someone the long-suffering household members may have needed to be freed from long ago because their children are cretins, monsters. She tried to hang herself in her cell, but they cut her down and at the hearing she said, “Do whatever you want. You’re nobody to me because I’m still going to kill myself. I’m not going to live, and the Highest Court will vindicate me, because I’m fed up with living.” That’s what she said. But our presiding judge said, “But you see, dear, that’s us. We are the Highest Court, and whether you are or aren’t fed up is not for you to decide!” But she kept up her muttering: “I’m fed up with this life of yours.” That’s what I wrote: fed up.What that one word costs! Just try it! The primitive H may not merit special mention. Its crossbar is written on a slant in a single stroke. You place the tip of your pen at the beginning, then bend your fingers right away, and the pen itself pulls you down, but the main thing here is the pressure. God forbid you press too hard or lift too much because the line isn’t supposed to breathe! The flamelike shape—because it does resemble a tongue of flame—bends first to the left, then the right. It gets fatter in the middle and dwindles to nil at the ends. On the third beat the stick has a curve at the bottom. The first five sections of the line are drawn straight, but on the sixth the pressure eases up and the line, rounding, drifts off to the right, ending at the invisible line that confines each letter to its allottedspace, its cell, you might say. Below, where the stick curves, between the imagined field of the cell and the tip of the line it contains, you get an empty corner. After the curve the fine line goes up—not straight up but in an arc—bending slightly to the right so as not to lose contact with the page and break through to the ë , a cunning ninny, unprepossessing to look at, but demanding caution and deft treatment in order to achieve the desired end. After the clumsy, snub-nosed H , the e requires a light, graceful line that begins with an eyelash stroke and a bend to the right, cuts across the middle evenly on an incline, flies back after the bend, nearly grazing the ceiling of its chamber, and as it falls back in its noose rushes into the half-oval with pressure on the left side; moreover the bend of the capillary outline is hidden in the half-oval but is not left behind. After a break the pen heads all the way to the upper corner of the next cell. The merest tremble or thickening could instantly destroy the illusion of this free soaring, which takes a drastic gain in altitude to become a. The secret essence of this spindleleg lies by no means in the spaces that run through it from top to bottom but in the concluding, unremarkable, but danger-laden sign-off loop beyond which the m is already twitching impatiently. Here it’s important not to be too hasty in imprinting the tightening loop but to wait for the loop to turn almost into a period. Then you can rush headlong into three holes in a row, returning happily once again to the e , p , and n , which is hardly a letter, just aon a stick. But onward, onward, to the very end and the, that amazing, anthropod peahen, the only one that falls into a full five beats! There’s something of the two-headed eagle to it and at the same time its soft half-ovals sit firmly on the line,