"When you finally get to the phrase that needs improving, you have to rotate the platen downward in order to squeeze fresh words above it...."

"Because of this awkwardness, the tendency of the typer, as opposed to the writer (in Truman Capote’s famous distinction), is to move ever forward, ever faster. Why waste thirty seconds revising an obscure clause, when you can tack on an explanatory sentence in five? Hence paragraphs come out longer than they should be, and an accretion of verbal debris weighs the typescript down. Such debris, of course, can be cleared away in revision. But the tolerance that permitted it in the first place tends to lower critical standards the second time around. The pen, on the other hand, is an instrument of thrilling mobility. Its ink flows as readily as the writer’s imagination. Its nib flickers back and forth with the speed of a snake’s tongue, deleting a cliché here, an adjective there, then rearing up suddenly into white space and emitting a spray of new words.... Unlike the electric typewriter, it does not buzz irritatedly when motionless, as if to say, Hurry up, I’m overheating. It sits quietly in the hand, comforting the fingers with acquired warmth, assuring you that the sentence you are searching for lies somewhere in its liquid reservoir...."

From the essay "The Pen Is Mightier Than the Smith-Corona" — written in 1981, before writers used word processors.

The essay, by Edmund Morris, is collected in "This Living Hand: And Other Essays" (commission earned). 

I added the link on "Truman Capote's famous distinction." My link goes to Quote Investigator, which looks into whether Capote really said — about "On the Road" — "That’s not writing, that’s typing."

"Several years ago, an optometrist ambushed me during a routine exam: 'Do you know you have retinitis pigmentosa?'"

"... I had no idea what she was talking about. She followed with another question: 'Are you night blind?' Indeed, I was. I’ve never been able to see in the dark; it’d been something of a running joke among family and friends since I was a kid. 'Clumsy,' we called it.... I had a progressive eye disease that eventually results in blindness. There’s no cure."

Writes Jon Gingerich in "How I wrote my first novel while going blind – and kept it a secret" (The Guardian).

"I sold my novel last year. In a decision that was fully on-brand, I didn’t tell my publisher I’d lost my vision.... [M]y worst days are the ones when I realize I’m left to work with pieces of myself, that I’ve become unmoored from the human experience in some fundamental way. But... [w]e are a collection of small losses, and each of them have a distinct weight. We have no idea what others are walking around with, the weight they’re carrying on their shoulders.... [C]ommitting to the cane was the most terrifying development yet, because it meant my secret was out.... I felt relief that no one batted an eye. Why would they, anyway?"

"We have no idea what others are walking around with"... unless they use a cane or its equivalent (and we, ourselves, have the vision to see it).

A fresh keyboard.

How long do you put up with an old keyboard before you face reality and order a new one? I've seen keyboards fail before. It's always one key or 2 or 3 keys that get balky and then don't work at all. I once had a keyboard that failed beginning with the space bar. You face up to that really quickly. Another time, the "u" failed. That too is hard to work around. But this time it was the square brackets. For months, I have been working around the lack of square brackets keys. I need them whenever I'm shortening quotes and must supplement words or adjust capital letters. But what I've been doing is going to another document and cutting brackets out then pasting them into the new document. It's absurd how many times I have done this before taking 2 minutes to order a new keyboard. Now, the keyboard is here and I can handle quotes with ease once again. Let me try:

Human meat was typically prepared two ways: roasted or boiled.... [B]odies [were cut] into quarters with a bamboo knife, severing the head and the limbs from the trunk.... "The head is first carefully shaved . . . then boiled, as are the intestines, in ceramic cooking pots. Regarding the meat proper and the internal organs, they are placed on a large wooden grill under which a fire is lit.... [T]he meat... is divided among all those present. Whatever is not eaten on the spot is set aside in the women’s baskets and used as [food] the next day. As far as the bones are concerned, they are broken and their marrow, of which the women are particularly fond, is sucked."

That quote, like the quote in the post 5 posts down, is from the book I'm reading David Grann's "The Lost City of Z."