Pens, Ink, and Marcus Aurelius

TL;DR — I spend my days in code and my mornings copying dead Romans by hand with a flex nib. This post is about the pens, the ink, and why an engineer bothers.

The ritual

Most mornings, before the laptop opens, I write a page by hand. Usually it’s Marcus Aurelius or Seneca — passages copied out slowly, because copying them slowly is the whole point. “Fury is the weak person’s idea of strength.” “The actions of others cannot touch us; but anger can transform us.” You don’t absorb that at scrolling speed. You absorb it at the speed of a nib.

I think this is the same instinct that makes me write so much at work — design docs, runbooks, these posts. Writing is how I find out what I actually think. A keyboard is for transcribing thoughts you already have. A pen, somehow, is for having them.

The pen

The one I reach for most is a Magna Carta 600. Hand-turned ebonite — that red-and-black ripple is the material itself, not a coating — with a carved flower finial and a 14K “True Flex” gold nib that spreads from a hairline to a broad stroke under almost no pressure. I ink it with Pilot Iroshizuku Kon-peki, a blue that has no business being as good as it is.

There’s a line I wrote on that spec card that I keep coming back to:

The act of using a fountain pen daily is a ritual, an act of inner exploration and quiet dialogue.

That’s the engineering brain trying to justify an analog habit, and failing, and keeping the habit anyway.

The ink

Then there are the inks — which is where this hobby quietly turns into a second hobby. Diamine, Iroshizuku, Noodler’s, De Atramentis, Sheaffer. I keep a swatch library: a card per ink, each with a little face drawn in the ink itself, because a color name tells you nothing and a smiling blob tells you everything.

Why an engineer bothers

I build software for a living, and lately a lot of AI tooling. The whole job is removing friction — make the machine faster, the loop tighter, the latency lower.

The pens are the deliberate opposite. They’re friction I chose on purpose: a slow, physical, slightly fussy ritual that produces nothing shippable and resets something in my head before the day’s optimization begins. The ukulele in the corner does the same job, badly and happily.

If you’re into pens, tell me what’s in your daily rotation — I’m always looking for an excuse to justify one more bottle of ink.