Response to "I, Pencil" - By Leonard E. Read

In the story of the creation of the pencil, a pencil itself is describing how it is made. The story is a desription of how a pencil is never understood. A pencil describes how it is always thought of as a simple object used everyday by everyone in the word but nobody actually knows how to make it. It describes the whole long process that it took to make it. The wood it needed, the lead it needed and the little bit of metal it needed along with all the other things used for finishing touches. It tells us about the different people needed for every part of the pencil and what their role is in the making of the pencil. The pencil starts of by saying its a simple object that nobody knows how to fully make to how the government has control of an activity such as the making of the pencil.

"Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me."
"Don't overlook the ancestors present and distant who have a hand in transporting sixty carloads of slats across the nation."
"Once government has had a monopoly of a creative activity..."

These three quotes support my summary of the story by showing the three different aspects of the story. About how a pencil merged each topic into the other so smoothly. The pencil seemed to have a lot of personal views. It likes how everone likes it but he argues that nobody really knows it. It argues that although everyone may like it, no one knows how to make it. It shows through its story that it cherishes the process at which it has come. It explains the making of each part of him from the finished product to the end product very clearly. He starts with the finished part of him, persay the little piece of brass, and ends with the people who are involved in the coming of that piece. For example, to get the brass, people had to mine zinc and copper and have the skills to make shiny sheets of brass. The quotes are a representation of the thought process of the pencil as he is writing this story. The pencil is comparing the making of things to its final product. from raw materials to pencil, from the human voive to its visual deliverence to its destination. The story is of the deliverance of things in one piece to its final destionation from its original form as multiple pieces.