From To the Letter: A Celebration of the Lost Art of Handwriting by Simon Garfield:

 

This is a book about a world without letters, or at least this possibility.  It is a book about what we have lost by replacing letters with email–the post, an envelope, a pen, a slower cerebral whirring, the use of the whole of our hands and not just the tips of our fingers. It is a celebration of what has gone before, and the value we place on literacy, good thinking and thinking ahead. I wonder if it is not also a book about kindness.

 

On reading this paragraph in Garfield’s book on letters, I was reminded of the box of letters from my mother I have tucked away in my garage.  My mother died several years ago but every time I read one of those letters, she is with me again.  I can hear her voice in those words and I enjoy looking at her handwriting and at the writing paper she has chosen for me and the fact that, at one point in both of our lives, she too handled that letter.  I can’t say that about emails and although I still have some emails from her, it is her letters I cherish.

Or sometimes I think about the little packet of letters from a boy I knew in high school.  Our fledgling love affair did not come to fruition but those few letters remind me of what it was like to be in love when I was very young–the thrill, the hopes and dreams, the songs I sang in my heart, the sweet words he said to me.  The letters are tied up with ribbons and hidden away in a drawer like so many love letters in the past.  I can’t do that with an email.

Writing an email is quick and easy but I miss the beautiful paper and cards, filling my pen, writing slowly and evenly across the page, crossing out the wrong word and wondering how many errors would require a rewrite (usually only for invitations and business letters; personal letters rarely were re-written).  I miss going to the post office and carefully choosing which stamps to use for my letters. I miss sealing the envelope and rushing madly to the post box before the mail was collected that day and then haunting the mail box daily for a reply as soon as I thought one could come.  I miss rifling through the mail and tossing aside bills in search for a letter.  I miss brightly colored postcards from far away places that came a week after a friend came home from vacation.

I love reading collections of people’s letters.  Some of my favorite books have been memoirs, stuffed with copies of letters.  Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Jane Austen, Thomas Jefferson, and Galileo are just some of the people whose letters I have read and enjoyed.  One of my very favorite books, 84 Charing Cross Road, is a book of letters.  Somehow I don’t think we will see collections of famous people’s emails being published and what a loss that will be as letters reveal so much about a person.

I think we’ve lost something dear since we have replaced writing letters with emails and texts.  I look forward to reading Mr. Garfield’s book about letter-writing.  I suspect he will be a “kindred spirit.”

I’m nearing the end of Good Prose by Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd.  My current chapter has not been as quotable as past chapters but here are a couple of thoughts:

The familiar rules about writing turn out to be more nearly half-truths, dangerous if taken literally.  They are handy as correctives, but not very useful as instruction.

‘Never use a five-dollar-word when a fifty-cent word will do’ said Mark Twain, and this advice seems to be universally accepted.  True, there is no faster way to make a passage impenetrable than to accumulate long Latinate words.  But much of the force of English derives from the conquests and invasions that gave it multiple sources.  It is almost impossible to write prose in English without blending short, blunt Anglo-Saxon with more formal Latinate words, and the way you blend them matters.  It is a little-noted fact that a reader’s eye, just glancing at a page, can tell something about the contents simply by registering its texture.  The mere look of your prose can invite readers to go on or can warn them off before they read a word.

 

Continuing with Good Prose: The Art of Non-Fiction by Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd. This week I read about essays. I love to read essays. Like short stories, you can dip into a book of essays and read just one while you are having a cup of coffee or tea, then put the book away, and think about what you read. Did I agree or disagree? How would I say it differently? Why do I like this essay (or essayist) or why do I dislike what I’ve read?

Here are a few quotes about writing essays:

Most of the work that we call personal essay goes beyond logic and fact into the sovereign claims of idiosyncrasy. This is not to suggest that essays should be illogical, but they may be, and generally should be, extra-logical–governed by associative more than by strictly linear thought.

What gives you license to write essays? Only the presence of an idea and the ability to make it your own. People speak of the “personal essay” as a form, but all essays are personal. They may make sweeping pronouncements, but they bear the stamp of an individual mind. Original ideas, those hinges on which an era turns, are rare. It is unlikely that you will write The Origin of Species. Or that you will be Emerson. But originality and profundity are not identical. Profound ideas bear repeating, or rediscovery, and many original ideas do not. Essays are like poems in that they may confront old wisdom in a fresh way.

Self-doubt, fatal in so many enterprises, fortifies the essay.

Every essayist deals with the same general ingredients–self and experience and idea–but everyone deals with them differently. Good essayists share the ability and the confidence to use the power of their own highly specified convictions.

We read many of the essayists from past centuries: Montaigne, Francis Bacon, Charles Lamb, Emerson and Thoreau. We also like to read more modern essays be G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, and Dorothy Sayers.

I also enjoy reading essays by Virginia Woolf, Jan Struther, Wendell Berry, and Anne Fadiman.

Here are some links to essays that I especially appreciate. I hope these whet your appetite to read more of this wonderful genre of writing and perhaps they will even inspire you to try your hand at writing an essay of your own.

 

On Learning in War-Time – by C.S. Lewis

On Lying in Bed by G.K. Chesterton

Of Age by Montaigne

The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf

The Two Races of Men by Charles Lamb

AINSWORTH-ZAZOULIAN by Jan Struther

Never Do That to a Book by Anne Fadiman