Writing with pen and paper is radically different from writing in a computer; just consider how the latter has the cutting capability, a tremendously useful tool for editing, and how it necessarily changed our approach to writing.

In March, a Berlin newspaper reported that Nietzsche “feels better than ever” and, thanks to his typewriter, “has resumed his writing activities.” But the device had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s closest friends, the writer and composer Heinrich Köselitz, noticed a change in the style of his writing. Nietzsche’s prose had become tighter, more telegraphic. There was a new forcefulness to it, too, as though the machine’s power — its “iron” — was, through some mysterious metaphysical mechanism, being transferred into the words it pressed into the page. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” Köselitz wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, “my ‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.” “You are right,” Nietzsche replied. “Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”