I'm at eleven typewriters now, with ten in working order and one that is a toy. I gave two machines away for free, and I sold one to a workmate for the same amount of money that I spent on it. My intentions to acquire and keep them changed through the three years of me being into typewriters. It started with finding a broken SG1 in the trash at the side of the street that I was able to repair. Then I was looking for a use for it, because it had found a place in my heart. I found two other machines in working order, also in the trash at the side of the street, of which I am keeping one and I have one away because it wasn't my liking. I received one as a gift from my brother-in-law that was owned by his grandfather, which is a very nice machine that makes it easier to keep for sentimental reasons. Then there is another machine that once belonged to my long-gone grandfather, which I keep for sentimental reasons and its nice techno pica typeface. This list keeps going on. So, there's a mixed bouquet of reasons I make up to keep machines and why I just can't give that specific piece away. I know I'm a hoarder, but the size of the machines keeps me in certain limits. Is it consumerist? Well, yesn't. I must admit, I would love to own a chocolate script Olympia SM3, and yes, I do like to show off my four different typefaces. I am looking to find a sixties SM9 to find out what the fuss is about in comparison to my late seventies SM9. But on the other hand, nothing beats the satisfactory achievement of finishing another three pages letter for one of my daughters. I hope they will read my lines one day and hear their daddy's voice through the paper that I touched before them and the imprints that my muscles caused. It is a piece of me, turned into ink on paper, that remains. And it is some obsolete tech that I curated/used/liked/hoarded, that will probably go into steel recycling after I'm gone.

Chapter XIX

Being restless and miserable, and having no particular room to go to, I took a turn on the terrace, and thought it over in peace and quietness by myself. It doesn’t much matter what my thoughts were. I felt wretchedly old, and worn out, and unfit for my place–and began to wonder, for the first time in my life, when it would please God to take me. With all this, I held firm, notwithstanding, to my belief in Miss Rachel. If Sergeant Cuff had been Solomon in all his glory, and had told me that my young lady had mixed herself up in a mean and guilty plot, I should have had but one answer for Solomon, wise as he was, “You don’t know her; and I do.”

I began to feel a little uneasy. There was something in the way Penelope put it which silenced my superior sense. I called to mind, now my thoughts were directed that way, what had passed between Mr. Franklin and Rosanna overnight. She looked cut to the heart on that occasion; and now, as ill-luck would have it, she had been unavoidably stung again, poor soul, on the tender place. Sad! sad!–all the more sad because the girl had no reason to justify her, and no right to feel it.

take strong aim at the heart of the reader.