I’ve been picking my way through the collected letters of J.R.R Tolkien for the last couple of months. The guy was an inveterate and apparently tireless corresponder; this “selected” collection contains thousands of letters, to many different people, on subjects both profound and mundane. I don’t have the patience or stamina to read it straight through, so I’ve been dipping in here and there, sampling the stuff I find interesting. At first I thought that would just be Middle-Earth minutiae, but it turns out that the most interesting thing about this book is the portrait it draws of Tolkien himself: his struggles in writing the Lord of the Rings, in getting it published, in dealing with the aftermath. It’s by no means a complete picture of his life, of course, but you feel like you’re getting a really fascinating insight into a good portion of it.
I’ve never been a fan of the idea of reading other people’s letters, even famous people: for one thing, it always seemed like an invasion of privacy; for another, I thought it would be really, really dull. I still think I’m right on the first count, but don’t care so much anymore; because I was definitely wrong on the second.
The bad news is that we probably won’t be seeing too many of these kinds of collections in the near future: really, the whole notion of an epistolary life is coming to an end. People just don’t write letters anymore. I don’t have any hard figures to support this, of course (that would require research, which, besides being anathema to the whole ethos of the blogosphere, might turn up facts contrary to my thesis, which I’d have to ignore, and then what a big waste of time that would be), but with the advent of telegraphs, and then telephones, and then email, and then instant messaging, and now personal video feeds, there just isn’t much actual need to put pen to paper anymore.
You could argue that a piece of email is just an electric letter, but I really don’t think so: the immediacy of email, the speed with which it’s composed and sent and received, makes it something else entirely, something not too far removed from a conversation. Instant messaging is the same thing, or rather the same kind of thing: in its brevity, its immediacy, its telegraphic sublingual gutturalisms, it has much more in common with speech than it does with letters. A letter is a piece of architecture, a structure made out of words, and people tend to invest more of their time, and more of themselves, in its construction. Instant messaging, email, conversation are much more haphazard affairs, lean-to’s and thatched huts that won’t stand the test of time.
So how are future biographers going to get into their subjects’ heads? At best, all they’ll have is reams of scattered electric babble too nonsensical to decipher and probably too voluminous to even address; at worst, they’ll have nothing at all, just a series of actions they’ll have to interpret without the help of the actors themselves.
But. What if the whole self-chronicling impulse hasn’t died entirely, but has moved elsewhere, from the realm of serial, peer-to-peer paper correspondence to the expansive, broadcast, virtual world of blogging? There are blogs everywhere, and the best of them are not only well-written, insightful, funny, and interesting, but also offer a window into the blogger’s mind. If these things can somehow be preserved, they might offer a biographical vein richer than letters ever could.
6 comments ↓
well call me old fashioned but i make a hard copy of everything
and i love to write letters by hand, too. not as prolific as tolkein by half, though
btw- gracias for the “of” — that quite tickles my fancy
this is a great post; i read it twice. nice.
Another great topic. If blogging retains its popularity then I think we may have a much more accessible version of letter writing. With google’s acquisition of blogger, people’s written thoughts will soon be much more accessible and blogging much more popular.
I think there are subtleties about the two mediums (epistl-whatever-atory and electronic) that make each insightful. Letters are often well crafted gems, parsed and boiled etc., excepting of course the hastily written letters which became commonplace when paper became cheap and postage rates fell (don’t worry, not citing research here, of course, but I know these things used to be prohibitive in the olde days). Emails are often gutteral, halfhearted facsimilies of clear communication, but they have another advantage: their very spontenaity often allows unfettered access into the subject’s mindset. The length of time required to compose, mail and (in my reader’s case) decipher someone elses scribblings sometimes dulls the immediacy of thought and passion. It filters it. Btw, I think electronic mediums are all very different: blogs are (often) more composed/contrived, IMs are spontaneous, and emails are imbetween.
Francis Fukiyama’s “The End of History” (c.1990?) was an essay about how electronic communications were shrinking the length of time taken to compose and absorb information, so that the rapidity with which event, extrapolation, and interpretation occur eliminate longer “historical” comprehension. At least I think that was what it was about. I never read it. At 37 pages it was far too much to absorb.
Just like most everyone else, the convenience of text messaging and email has all but eliminated my need to write. And let’s be clear about this. By write I don’t necessarily mean taking feather to ink. I mean actually sitting down, thinking about what I want to say and how it should be constructed, and then generating the words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs to convey my thoughts. Perhaps I should start a blog before my writing abilities completely fade into oblivion.
In general I find that technology has done an outstanding job of killing the art of grammatically correct story telling. I was doing research a while back and came across several newspaper articles from the 1920s and 1930s. Frankly they horrified me. How is it in the last 90 years we as a people have reverted to writing like third and fourth graders. Maybe we should randomly place email into various publicly displayed terminals to instill a sense of fear that someone other than my intended audience may read something I write.
standardized grammar, spelling, & punctuation are relatively new phenomenons given the history of language.
lewis & clarke, both highly educated scientists & prolific writers, spelled “mosquito” 32 different ways in their journals. hemingway is the master of run-on sentences.
the key to language is communication and if i forget a comma here or there you still know what i mean. BUT i understand to some extent what you mean, z, because i won’t read things in which people write jibberish slang or abbreviate to the point of distraction.
and i suppose since i compose & edit legal documents for work i find that hyper-correct style restrictive of my creativity. hence the rambles.
Personally I love ramblings as well. I was speaking more to the use of vocabulary than strict structure. It certainly is more appropriate to end a sentence with a preposition than it used to be. I think we are both on the same page.
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