When writing takes flight

As soon as they're written down, words like to take off. My calamus and attempt at writing Greek letters on papyrus 15 years ago.

Spoken words fly. Verba volant. But written words may take flight too. Especially if they're written with a quill, which is, as the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam once put it, 'a small piece of bird's flesh'. Writing is upward-f…