Here’s another cool thing I picked up in Germany: a pencil made from a hollowed-out twig. There was no brand or label on it (I saw it at a garden center), and the woman at the checkout didn’t know where it came from. But it’s fun to use all the same, and reminds me of a passage from Nabokov that I read on Palimpsest:
We recognize [the pencil's] presence in the log as we recognized the log in the tree and the tree in the forest and the forest in the world that Jack built.
2 Comments
Gentian
I bought one of those for my cousin!
We found it in a shop at the Pike Place Market, Seattle. The one we got said it was made in Thailand. It is really neat 
Lito
Oh, you are faster than me, QuoVadis. I picked up a similar pencil up in the Lake District, near Borrowdale actually, and was planning to write about it. “Watch it cut into lengths by old Elias Borrowdale…”