My typewriter is dead

1911 LC Smith Brothers Model 8: my miniature temple of ingenuity. The carriage seems now permanently frozen, waiting for a magical hand to release it and push it back. Perpetually in mid-sentence. An unfinished thought. It was one of my favorite material objects. So incredibly clever and complicated, a surviving testament to invention. It worked perfectly, or so I believed. It was a great comfort to me, this $15 garage sale purchase; it gave me hope, the way an ancient monastery, still carrying on in the decline of the civilization gives hope to the weak willed and faithless but secretly, lazily devout (like me). My typewriter made me feel great, knowing it could pound out a letter to the editor just as it did in 1911. Matthew 6:19 "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal."

It has succumbed. Probably the victim of my kids (who I love infinitely more than this stupid typewriter) who could not resist vigorously pounding on the keys. I can not blame them.

Yes, it could be fixed, I could spend more than the gross annual income of a family of six in Rwanda to fix a slowly decaying piece of technological history but I won't. I could spend many hours painstakingly attempting to fix it myself only to be disappointed that it really isn't so mystical at all, just a bunch or sprockets and springs and levers and gears and not a life force all to itself. Everything I own will one day be dirt. I will be dirt. Put not your faith in typewriters.