Work Text:
Writing by hand was not quite a lost art. On Coruscant, there wasn’t much use for it, but a Jedi’s duties took them far and wide, to many planets with many customs, so it was a skill they all learned and practiced.
Obi-Wan had never imagined the extent that he would end up using it, however. Certainly, a holocron would have suited his purposes better in many ways. But a mad hermit’s journal might be overlooked. A holocron might too, but not by the more dangerous agents of the Empire.
So he wrote.
He wrote of his day, of the things he was experiencing on Tatooine. He wrote of the people he saw and spoke to – fewer in number than he was once accustomed to, but no less in character. He wrote of his hopes for the future, for the days when the Empire would be a distant memory.
But above all else, he wrote of the Jedi. He wrote everything he could think of, from their tenets that he could recite from heart, to in-depth training routines, to anecdotes from his own childhood, to descriptions of the Archives or the Room of a Thousand Fountains. He keenly felt his lack of ability to encompass it all, how small a part of his people he could capture in this little book. He could describe everything he remembered, but knew that words could never compare to living it. And there was so much that he didn’t know, or only knew in passing, that he couldn’t hope to even begin to describe.
But something was better than nothing, and there were so few Jedi left that if anything of their history was to survive, Obi-Wan had to write.
And trust that one day, Luke, and other Jedi to come, would read it.