You may be reading (or listening) to this online, and if so, I’m glad you’re there and grateful that you’re reading it at all. But today I want to invoke the pleasures of paper and celebrate its many forms as a printed medium of communication. As the digital and the virtual and the artificial increasingly colonize our consciousness, paper appears endangered, and maybe it is, but that’s all the more reason to remind ourselves of its endurance as a physical record of human culture and a means of its transmission.

For all the magical devices that are extensions of the nervous system and therefore magnets of attention, books, magazines, newspapers, letters, notebooks, diverse visual and graphic works on paper — and the great variety of papers, from handmade to newsprint — continue to serve as vital tactile realities that can function when the grid goes down and the wireless networks are on the blink. The electronic tablet is a miracle, but the paper document, the original manuscript, the pages you turn by hand as you read in bed may well outlast many newer and more incredible technologies.

It’s true that reading and writing by hand on paper are habits of an older generation and that younger people raised to be screen literate may find print to be a static medium where their jumpy attention has a hard time staying focused. But by the same token the nervous overload of digital hyperactivity may so exhaust its subject that the materiality of paper is a relief from the onslaught of the virtual.

In my admittedly anachronistic experience, the intimacy of reading a text — a poem, a story, an article — on paper, the undistracted slowness of sustained attention, the silent sound of language inside your head transmit a stimulus that is calm and steady and invites reflection rather than distraction.

The New York Times on paper, though its type is small and my aging eyes sometimes require a magnifying glass, affords an experience I find fatally diminished on a digital screen; despite so much soul-sickening information, the pages themselves in their visual design, the placement of stories, the formal poetics of headlines, the choice and layout of photos and graphics give me the pleasure of a media experience I don’t find anywhere else.

Perhaps this is perverse, especially here on the Central Coast with its excellent weather; instead of reading a newspaper, or writing for one, I should be outdoors running or hiking or riding a bike or taking a walk by the ocean or surfing or playing golf or strolling around downtown, but I can still fit some of those things in without abandoning print. I enjoy receiving personal messages via email (sorry, no texts — I don’t tote a phone) but I find so much more satisfying the arrival in the mail of a hand-addressed envelope containing a letter, even if it was typed and printed on a computer.

And the writing of such a letter, with pen on paper, or typing it on my vintage Olivetti Lettera 22; selecting the envelope of appropriate shape and size to accommodate enclosures (mostly newspaper clippings); choosing from an assortment of stamps one that I expect will please the recipient — I find such a leisurely process grounding, stabilizing, mood-regulating when the atmospheric agitation of the outside world feels unbearably chaotic.

Writing anything, including this column — whose first draft is set down in a notebook with a favorite pen whose shape feels good in my fingers and whose ink seems to carry my thoughts on a black stream — is a form of mindful meditation I find physically calming, centering, even as what I’m saying may reach outward. It will be typed into a laptop, printed, corrected, printed again, edited and revised some more before I send it in. This is where I’m best able to think without my mind spinning out of control with excess information; grounded, anchored, in the enduring gravity of paper.

Stephen Kessler’s column appears on Saturdays.