Hard Cases for a Handle Theory
Consider how you hold a piece of chalk. Not by the handle: it doesn’t have one. Or, if it does, that handle is of the chalk’s own substance, flesh of its flesh, distinguishable only because it is the bit left in your hand when you can’t write anymore. A useless nub, or stub, or butt. Its persistence is a faint embarrassment, a remainder you don’t know what to do with—maybe you should stuff it in your pocket, or leave it in the tray with the erasers, or drop it on the floor and grind it into dust with your heel. It’s a waste, surely, just to throw it out. But it cannot be grafted onto another piece of chalk, not without gratuitous ingenuity, nor can it be used to hold anything else. It’s like the end of a pencil or of a filterless cigarette. Life is a midden of such abandoned handles. You didn’t even know they were handles, until they lost their grip and you were left holding them in a pinch, a pinch that can narrow, without your noticing, to contempt.
Common as they are, I take the class of such objects to be small. Chalk, cigarettes, wooden pencils, and (unless you are among the frugal grafters) the leftover lozenge of soap that turns out to have held the rest of the bar. Are there others? Small, and yet disproportionately prominent in life, especially in the sort of thinkerly, all-too-grown-up life where people write and teach, and clean up before they do things, not just after, and smoke to fire up the recalcitrant brain and the sleepless body. Knowing to take something by the handle and use it properly, even just to tell the handle from the thing—these are accomplishments of the complex developmental, historical condition of adulthood, with its unsentimental skills of picking up and setting down. To base a theory of the handle on chalk, which hides its handle until the handle has no use, is to begin with an especially hard case. Begin with cases, however, I must, for a proper theory will not be a theory from first principles. There is always something secondary, even tertiary about a handle, located as it is between the hand and the thing. Roll that last bit of chalk around in your mind for a moment, then, and try to decide what to do with it.
