Inarticulate by Choice and the Future of the Intellectual Past, Part Seven

George Tooker, "Landscape with Figures," 1965-66. 

By Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn

In this series of posts, I have raised questions about the ramifications of the decline of letter writing for both professional and personal life. Paper correspondence has traditionally played a vital role in both realms and thus in the study of them. My rumination turned from worries about the gap in the historical record that seems destined to result from the shift to electronic communications, when it comes to traces of the meandering of thoughts and the feelings often implicated in them, to a celebration of what letter writing offers for the development of the inwardness potentially necessary for the deepest forms of human connection.
                                                                                                
I uttered a little moan of lamentation, received thoughtful responses from long-trusted and newfound kindred spirits who assured me that I am not alone in my longing for the real, and even managed to stir James Livingston to write a guest post on my quixotic concerns. My job is done here. Almost.

Before returning to the professional side of things in this last post in the series, I feel compelled to add a couple of concluding refinements or caveats to my case for letter writing over email, bearing perhaps more on the personal than the professional, though these are often so closely intertwined as to be inseparable.

1. Electronic communications are better than no communications at all--when there should be communications. This standard of what "should be" is a topic for another day. Suffice it to say that the quality of communication is, of course, directly connected to the participants' understanding that when there should be silence there is silence. This is one of my main points of letter writing. Electronic communications as now used and advertised rest on the assumption that nonstop connectivity--a matter of quantity--is enlivening rather than potentially soul-deadening. The tradition of letter writing presumes life-generating silences, a question of quality.

2. The matter that reigns supreme in correspondence, from the recipient's point of view, is who exactly is doing the communicating. For all the importance I have placed on form, in its intimate association with content, the principle that trumps it is the identity, unique and interchangeable, of the voice uttering the words. Perhaps I wouldn't go so far as to say that The Messenger is the Message. But then again, I could be persuaded. As the saying goes, "My kingdom for a horse": I could imagine trading a lifetime of paper correspondence that circled the globe for one emailed sentence, depending on just what was said and who said it, even though I have been arguing that every little thing involved in the manner in which our communications are conveyed actually does make a difference. The assumption of the technological revolution seems to be that all of the glorious niceties--the feel of the paper between our fingers, the thoughts that might occur between receiving a message and sending a response--are unnecessary peripherals, mere tokens of inefficiency, distractions. Perhaps I am just saying that, since The Message is Not the Only Message, that hypothetical sentence might be far less likely to be formulated in the first place in a world absent letters. That it is now via email, if indeed it is, might just be a case of living on borrowed time. Our imaginations, which can perhaps so far keep the inner life alive despite the wholesale daily assault on it, might be pushed to the breaking point any day now.

*

A last word about email communications and the workplace. I am part of the last generation of scholars to work in an academic setting before email took over entirely. For a few years in the early to mid-nineties, as I entered the professoriate, grateful for all that I thought it might offer, email was not part of life. Kept to a bare minimum, essential messages were typed on memo stationery (usually by our secretarial staff, now preoccupied with other tasks, such as endless reports for the administration), photocopied, and placed in our mailboxes in the History Department. Other essential information was conveyed at the occasional department meeting and nonessential announcements simply posted on the bulletin board, for the moment when one was actually seeking such information. Students brought their questions to office hours. If a colleague wanted to convey something, it was common to do it on the phone or...novelty of novelties...in person. I'm not trying to claim it was a golden age. But there was a kind of simplicity to the rhythm of our work lives. I admit to knowing a pace and structure that left room for rumination, freed us up for the flow of ideas. It was never written or said and did not have to be, but the senior professors might as well have chiseled it unmistakably in stone: an intrinsic part of this particular job, part of what made it so unlike so many others, was that it left you to yourself. What were you presumably doing? Something along the lines of digging down into a deep well you were assumed to be adding to daily through reading and thinking, and coming up with what you needed there in order to teach and write. It was a given that the kind of work we do necessitates a certain state of mind and even, dare I say it, personal dignity or meditative decorum--one deliberately resistant to the rapacious haste of mainstream business and street life, voracious consumerism and other knee-jerk, time-cramming self-entertainments, celebritydom unstrung, and all the other forms of deafening interference that care to come a-buzzing and a-crackling along.

In just a few years as email invaded the workplace for historians has changed: dismal job market, shrunken history departments, humanities crisis, yes, and less commented upon, perhaps in part because of these very things, the sometimes nauseating taste of what remains. One need not adopt the fallacy of technological determinism to observe that the mere introduction of electronic communications into departmental matters changed things. This mode of communication, of course, lent itself beautifully to the further intrusion of the marketplace into every last aspect of higher education. Email allows administrators, upper management, to get the maximum productivity from their workers, if you define productivity by punching the time-clock. Inherited internal standards of productivity seem to me to be in tension with the new presumption of continual connectivity and the instantaneous response. Where once those on sabbatical were unreachable, they can now be in contact anywhere in the world around the clock. In a more everyday example, when a professor was not in a classroom or office hours, he or she was left alone to do work that was assumed to be important.

I am willing to grant that there are some workplace matters, the quickest handling of which is a great mercy. Email may indeed be a more desirable alternative to some kinds of meetings, a blessing in disguise. Even there, though, it is questionable what came first. Didn't the increase in academic bureaucracy and administrative tasks of all kinds come first, thus making email look like a much-needed time saver? And doesn't the widespread welcome of email on the grounds of efficiency actually obscure a rather deep cynicism about human interaction? For the short run, it is great to be relieved of having to meet with difficult colleagues in fields notorious for a dearth of social skills. In the long run, though, workplaces characterized by minimal expectations for human interaction seem like something out of a George Tooker painting. Have we lost our ability to become disturbed by the rather shocking realities of our own lives? By resorting to email for everything without making clear distinctions and making use all of the arts of differentiation at our disposal, don't we daily recreate a world in which even people working steps away from one another choose to use email rather than make eye contact, stop by in person, or pick up the phone at risk of hearing a human voice? I'm just asking.

The use of technology for departmental and other such professional matters, is here for the time being, anyway. But that is not the main issue here. For our purposes what I am most concerned about is separating our more substantive correspondence from this soul-chilling medium and form, electronic mail of the business-like variety. The resort to email for everything--the combination of necessary academic workplace uses with the desire to keep in touch with colleagues at one's own institution and beyond--threatens to make the differences less perceptible. Others have written about how email does away with tangible signs of a particular correspondent and correspondence, marks of their irreplaceability. We can't let this happen, can we? By going along with it, aren't we giving our assent to the leveling of all kinds of communications and thus of all kinds of relations, including those most intellectually and personally meaningful? Doesn't this threaten to bring everything down to the same low level of importance, coating even the most striking colors and glints--the real treasures of human interaction embedded in our very words to one another--in a stomach-turning wash of business-like, toxic-sludge gray?

As I said, I'm just asking.

Inarticulate by Choice: The Decline of Letter Writing and the Future of the Intellectual Past, Part Five

By Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn

Are our latest electronic technologies capacious enough to provide a real space for the cultivation of the outward-extending interiority associated with letter-writing and attendant activities? I'd love to think so. Please prove your case by making it happen.

Enthusiasts say, enthusiastically, yes! Well, actually they say something more vague, along the lines that new technologies allow for new forms of everything, from interiority to communication. We're waiting...

My hopelessly old-fashioned question is, simply, and most likely, simplistically:

Can email be used to continue the practice of letter writing?

Just so you know, I fully realize how quaint that sounds, how out of step with our times, how amusing. I'm even amused. But maybe you will agree with me--later if not at this moment--that not everything amusing is a laughing matter.

I think that whether real letters can still survive, exist, or be revived in the plugged-in, shock-giving, electrified form of email is really the key question at this particular moment in the history of technologies of writing and communications. Why? For the reasons I've been trying to suggest in recent posts having to do with the precise form of reflection, interiority, communication, and human connection embodied in the personal letter and associated practices. But also because I don't see the other current forms--such as cell phone texting (CMIIW), tweeting (really, now), or posting on people's "walls" on social network sites like Facebook (Hey, everyone, here's me having fun!)--as contenders. In an earlier post, I did suggest that bløgging, which I think is a different animal, may be doing some of what letter-writing used to do.

If the best written correspondence does not have to be unplugged, so be it. I'm game. If it potentially means fewer half-baked, soul-crushingly cryptic and business-like memos and more reflection and communication of genuine thoughts and feelings in their elaborate complexity, anything is worth a try. I would envision something like this, but others might suggest something better. I'm all ears.

How to Lend to Email the Quality and Qualities of Letters*

*if it can be done, which is highly unlikely

1. Set up a separate non-work email account for privacy and distinction from existing, soulless accounts.
2. Deliberate over aesthetics, changing details like signature and font size and style until you have a distinctive stationery of sorts. Save the template and set it as your new default so your electronic letters have some consistent character identified with you, as usually happens with real mail.
3. Compose your missive at greater length than with a typical email, taking the care you might with a letter.
4. Think once, twice, even thrice about word choice, even perhaps consulting a reference work designed to help in this effort, such as a dictionary or even a thesaurus, which a classicist told me today means "treasure" in Greek.
5. Pause to reflect, proofread, and consider what you have written. Does it convey what you want it to convey? After all, some (postmodernists but even many before them) have rightly anguished over the inability of words to capture fully what we mean under the best circumstances, so just one approach, given this conundrum, might be trying to come as close as possible.
6. Try imagining yourself the intended recipient when thinking of what to say and how to say it.
7. Don't click on "send" until you are really ready.
8. On the receiving end, don't click on "open" until you are really ready. Then, print it.
9. If it is a case of wanting to savor it, wait until you can tune everything else out and give it the attention it deserves. Arrange your setting just so: perhaps make a cup of coffee and settle into a favorite chair, go to the café, sit somewhere where you can look off into the distance, watch the clouds go by, lose yourself in the voice behind the words on paper. Yes, paper. Call me what you will. And if you are dreading this communication for any reason, put in place the proper supports (a stiff drink, a good friend nearby with a real--here virtual really won't do--shoulder to cry on) or, perhaps better yet, just press "delete." (Maybe this is where electronics do come in more handy than previous forms, as tearing up paper takes more effort and time.)
10. Read it. Slowly.
11. If it is worthy, reread it.
12. If it is worthy, reread it. (You get the picture. This step can and should be repeated as many times as you need or wish.)
13. Give yourself time to think about what you are reading and have read.
14. Give yourself time to feel something about what you are reading and have read, or about anything else that comes up as you do.
15. Let time pass. Yes, time. You've heard of it before. This can be done.
16. Now ask yourself what you think and feel about what you have read. This is one of the most interesting and important aspects of all this, after all--the thinking and feeling a real letter can occasion. And the time element. Meaningful written communications, like very few other things, have that intriguing capacity to turn back, move forward, stop, fill to overflowing, and otherwise alter time as we know it.
17. When ready, write back. That is, write back if and only if you feel compelled to do so. Was anything actually compelling in what the other has written? This is a test of whether such communications should continue to be exchanged between you and the recipient of the product of what can only be considered a labor of love. Composing and mustering up the courage to send a real letter requires significant time and effort, unlike the usual run-of-the-mill email message, that paragon of thoughtlessness. As has been said of aging, opening one's heart or mind or soul to another, let alone two of these or, as happens only in the rarest of cases, all three, is not for the faint of heart.

A small number of self-imposed rules might enhance the experience, such as:

1. No use of "cc." Ever.
2. No use of "bcc." Ever times infinity.
3. No clicking on "reply" until at least 24 hours after receiving a letter-type email, just as you would normally wait to send a response through the regular mail until the next day's mail. (I for one might be willing to grant an exception to this rule in cases of great passion, as in the days of hand-delivered missives, deliverable at all hours--at least in the movies. In this case, the response-time might be part of the content of what is actually being communicated.)
4. No reading without printing. If a letter cannot even be said to be worth the paper it was printed on, can it really be considered a letter? And in the event it turns out not to be worth the paper it was printed on, please recycle.

Ok, then. You can write me a letter to let me know whether it is working. But don't forget to put a stamp on it.

Just another nostalgic dispatch from the virtual trenches of the Slow Thought movement...

Inarticulate by Choice: the Decline of Letter Writing and the Future of the Intellectual Past, Part Four

By Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn

Letter-writing and kindred practices that involve at least a minimal degree of contemplation, even if it is only the momentary breath before folding, sealing, stamping, addressing, and mailing a real letter, can remind someone of nothing less than the existence and importance of the inner life. They are emanations, indications, signs of an inner existence that is paradoxically the only pathway to any real connection with another person.

Horace Pippin, Interior, 1944

If that's all such practices were-signs of an inner life-maybe one would not need to worry unduly about the demise of any particular ones. The inner life endures and is revealed in other places too, after all. But what if the realm of thought and feeling is more fragile than many, seemingly in thrall to the engines of "creative destruction," seem to presuppose today, and what if each event that occurs in it is unique and not replicable?

What if practices like letter-writing are not just signs and reminders that the inner life is real, but are preconditions for it, the very materials and means from which the inner life is forged in the first place? Or, barring that, what if they tend to produce interiority of a particular kind, nature, or quality some, if not all, of us cannot dispense with?

But wait. I can hear them already, the echoes of the usual, exhausted post-post-modern (or did I miss another post when I blinked?) alleged critique. Hasn't the veil been removed and all such practices revealed to be just so many adornments with which members of the elite decorate their palaces?

Why don't we ask all those living lives in constant drudgery, from slaves to sweatshop workers, whether the inner life matters? Perhaps they would drop their prayers and work songs, their aspirations to read the Bible and classic works of history and literature, their heroic efforts to learn to write so they can keep in touch with loved ones wrenched from their everyday environs by joblessness, war, or the sale of human  beings, upon learning from latter day progressives that letter-writing and allied practices are functions only of Leisure, accoutrements of the pampered classes. Well, we have asked them. Historians who have traced their intellectual history have found the inner life alive and well among the less privileged.

Even if the charge of elitism were true, that letters and the inner life they represent are the sole preserve of the well-off, it would be a heartless argument. Not everyone who has it all, as they say, necessarily has anything of real value. Even those among us with wealth, material luxuries, and education are hardly by definition untroubled. Letters sent and received could actually mean something in their case too.

Letter-writing has been practiced by those from all walks of life, whenever possible, in many places and times before our own. It is not only the social elite who has kept such practices alive, but also those who were shut out of the corridors of power and financial gain. Those who dismiss the practices of the inner life as frills mistake the chimera for the real thing--the life-saving phenomenon I have in mind, the activity that has kept so many of those mired in the complexities of their own thought process from the abyss.

In these posts, what I have been trying to get across is perhaps best seen as an existential-spiritual case for the state of mind letter-writing as a serious mode of sustained communication between two people tends to foster. A way of living intentionally, perhaps in tune with the current notion of mindfulness, which seems like one of the more promising developments on the therapeutic horizon. My concern is about whether treating letter-writing as merely a frill that can be unthinkingly dispensed with in our rush to embrace whatever computer salespeople want us to embrace next not only demeans an activity many have found deeply meaningful but brings more alienation to people showing rather significant signs of alienation already.

Arguments dismissive of letter-writing as merely another mode of communication that can be superceded without conscience or improved upon with electronics may prove to be right. But they may also be a product of a way of thinking promulgated by those with a direct investment in casting the inner life as an agent of the status quo rather than something that is, potentially anyway, a radically free space uniquely resistant to the incursion of direct politicizing or marketing. It is possible that complacency toward the therapeutic consumer capitalism of these times blinds us to the way that the inner life might be something that is perhaps only ever forged in struggle, in resistance, in opposition. What if the inner life is always an act of total desperation? What if the forming of a self is only ever an attempt to cast out a lifeline, à la Whitman's "noiseless, patient spider"? In the potentially soul-destroying realities human beings face even in the best of times, to say nothing of the sheer terror and ugliness of the time in which we live, with total annihilation always just a push button away and goodness too often denied, dismissed altogether as something off the grid, or trivialized as a commodity like everything else, meant only for consumption, the death of the inner life is, I would contend, simply not an option. Its death is the luxury that we cannot afford.

Those most eager to embrace today's "speed of light" pace in all things, even in regards to that most precious of all reasons for living and staying alive-the quality of our interactions with fellow human beings-seem all too happy to dispense with contemplation and meditation as though these were character flaws out of sync with our new post-post-post-ness, signs of hesitation and weakness of will. If anything, they may be the very opposite. The aforementioned paradox, that it is through a rich inner life that we reach out to others most completely and consummate our desire for true connection, reveals practices such as letter-writing, or anything else that makes us keen more toward articulating our innermost thoughts and feelings and less toward suffering in our solipsism or spiritual and intellectual death, no frill. Anything that makes this possible is no luxury; it is a life and death issue. Indeed, ask the suicide in all of us: this is the direst of needs.

To put it more simply, lest I be misunderstood: the conditions for thinking in this way, a way that leads us so directly to others, should be cultivated at all costs. In many letters, a gift of a part of ourselves is conferred. Can the same be said of electronic communications, as we know and use them today?

Image Credits: Horace Pippin, Interior, 1944, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Meyer P. Potamkin.

Inarticulate by Choice: the Decline of Letter Writing and the Future of the Intellectual Past, Part Three

By Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn

Gabriel Metsu, Man Writing a Letter, c. 1664-6

This continues my rumination on the influence of the demise of letter-writing on us and the future practice of intellectual history.

Questions for ongoing contemplation:
What will be the future of intellectual history without letters?
What will be the future of the life of the mind without letters?
Without letters, what will be the future of life, love, and learning between and among people who spend much of their time lost in thought?
What do letters provide that our current electronic communications cannot?
Can we picture a renaissance of letter-writing and the attendant emotional, intellectual, even spiritual practices that have often accompanied it?
Can we nurture what is best in electronic communications, helping to humanize them, but counteract what is worst? Can we aim for a blend of new and old practices that foster a certain richness of private intellectual exchange qua interpersonal communication, given the change in technology and daily habits we have experienced of late?

In my last post, I listed some unique aspects of letter-writing that strike me as too important to abandon recklessly: the length of a letter; the time it takes to write and read one; the role of composition in letter-writing, which fosters and accommodates changing mental moods; its deliberateness; its (initial) privacy and intention to speak personally to another unique, (usually) existing person; the eclecticism of its content; and, finally, the mode of meditation one finds with letters versus most email messages.

A picture of intellectual history in the future sans lettres:
We might wish, as one example, to get to the bottom of why USIH was formed. What were the historical circumstances in which it took root? When and to whom did the idea first occur? What exactly was the idea and how did it develop over time? What other ideas were circulating, and what happened to them? What different diagnoses and interpretations informed the paths taken and not taken? What ideas, works, and practices resulted and why...and on and on...

How will we find out about these things, and all the other things we might want to know about people's thoughts in the past? For instance, say we are enchanted (or horrified) by a particular writer, idea, line of reasoning, school of thought, or portrait of the world, or that we have a desperate need to answer some question of burning personal or wider importance. We might want to know more than a particular published work can tell us about what a writer meant in a particular passage. Well, let's go through our possible sources and their limits in the foreseeable future.


Oral History:
Randomness of who is willing and able to be interviewed, according to the vagaries of personality and fate. Limits of memory. Our tendency to embroider.
Published Articles and Books:
Limited scope of the formal topic at hand for informing a different, unforeseen inquiry. Our reticence about certain kinds of motivations when speaking to unknown readers versus people we know and (might) trust.
Electronic Communications:
No permanent record, in most cases. Of records that do exist, randomness of sample. Uneven practices regarding saving or deleting emails. Vulnerability of written record vis-à-vis non-hard (soft?) copies. Rarity of email printing. Brevity of emails; their memo-like style more suited to bureaucracy than intellectual life or the world of scholarship, arts and letters, and deep and sustained relationships in which ideas play a central role. Unclear privacy guidelines. Law.
Personal Records (Journals, Notes): Absence of hard-copy sources. Disappearance of such a historical record beyond the life of a particular personal electronic device. Affiliation of practices that produce such records with the world of e-communications, which are currently affecting them too. Many problems they share with email (above), such as invasion of privacy in examining someone's electronic note-taking.
Other: [you fill in please]

Until even the very recent past, the prime source for ferreting out the answers to questions like this, or just for exploring the context in which particular ideas or intellectual movements developed, has been letters.

As is well known by present readers, in the historical profession during the 1960s and ensuing decades a cry rang out not just for "history from the bottom up" but also for a "history of the inarticulate." Jesse Lemisch began a 1969 Journal of Social History article called "Listening to the 'Inarticulate'" by quoting W.E.B. DuBois: while "of kings and gentlemen we have the record ad nauseam and in stupid detail...the common run of human beings and particularly of the half or wholly submerged working group, the world has saved all too little of authentic record and tried to forget or ignore even the little saved."

The widespread dismissal of intellectual history until very recently as history of, by, and for the elites, in convergence with the e-revolution, may be rendering those with rare gifts of expression--for all intents and purposes, in relation to scholars of the future--the new inarticulate. The world in this case seems again to be saving "all too little of authentic record."

When history shuts a door, unlike God, it doesn't necessarily open a window. In fact, so many doors of inquiry risk being slammed shut for good, and with them innumerable windows, it is frightening. Even in the best of times, the salvaging of a one-time insight or revealing connection borders on trying to capture the ineffable.

Yet my fears run even deeper than historical sources and preservation. Silence in the historical record has sometimes been surmounted, as we are creatures of inventiveness and tremendous moral imagination. Letters, though, are inseparable from a whole set of other behaviors and practices. Letter-writing traditions of course vary greatly and have their own histories. The one, or ones, that shaped the letters with which we are most familiar in our research or our own lives are tied to certain habits of sociality and particular notions of the project of selfhood as a vital pursuit.

You might say that other practices have taken over where letter-writing left off. If so, you may need, for people like me, to begin to count the ways.

What I wonder, of course, is whether the end of an entire approach to life itself--the collective life as well as the inner life, inextricably intertwined as they are--is now at stake.

Letter-writing, along with a poignantly limited number of other practices at our disposal, has the potential for limited repair of an otherwise fatal breach, for forestalling tragedy. Without such steps toward reparation there are not only no historical records of much of our thinking but possibly little thinking of which it is worth preserving a record in the first place. Or perhaps no thought at all, nothing that can count as thought.

This is because thinking and thought of the variety we traditionally have found worthy of devoting a life's work to understanding require cultivation.

Maybe I am calling for a Slow Thought equivalent to the Slow Food Movement. Isn't email the fast food equivalent of a letter?

One of the most noticeable effects of exchanging letters with my friend this last semester was the surge of hope that came from the very different experience of time that letters encourage, the reminder that the cultivation of the self is real and viable and life-sustaining. It can still certain anxieties intrinsic to our very experience of being human. It reminds us we are always in the process of becoming who we are, in relation to the one to whom we write, who is always in the process of becoming who she or he is. Communicating in depth with someone who is not there at the time creates a world apart from time as we commonly know it. And this is saying a lot. After all, time has the potential to be the very bane of existence.

A child discovers with horror that such a thing as death exists. Death, in time, takes away everything good around us. Time passes too fast and is the enemy.

A lover temporarily separated from the beloved agonizes over the absence. Every moment is an eternity. Time passes too slowly and is the enemy.

The act of writing a letter seems to me one of the valiant attempts we make toward repairing the breach of separation as made worse by the antics of time. Just as a knitter taking up a slipped stitch that threatens to unravel the entire garment, the letter-writer takes up the pen. Time circles around in a fold; wrinkles. Suddenly time is not linear, nor does it move too quickly or slowly. It stops. One is lost in a state of mind that is by definition at a remove from the immediate and, in so doing, redefines the immediate altogether in a new space of silence, contemplation, feeling, and thought.

In today's culture--all (feigned) immediacy, pressure, urgency, and in-your-face interruption--the writing and reading of a letter is an act of resistance. But in any era it is already an act of hope and faith. Hope that the reader understands. Faith that what one says at one time will still have meaning at another. Perhaps one could argue this holds for any form of writing, and there is surely truth in that. But without the adornments of letter writing and other private practices that presume the kinds of things that letters do, adornments that might seem to some to so many unimportant frivolities, mere luxuries, or options, the contemplative life may not exist.

Letter-writing and its kindred spirits, like the keeping of a diary, reminds us that our thoughts matter, or, even further, that getting them right matters. Not just in general or for their use value but in themselves, in the fullness of their particularity. Letters place on a pedestal thoughts and their expression, with all the splitting of hairs their readers expect and the indelible signs of their emotive, life context.

The reading and writing of letters reminds us we are not alone. They work against loneliness, in the obvious ways, but also in their capacity to turn the tables on the isolation that is perennially after us, eager to usher in despair along with it, to ridicule our most heartfelt and earnest preoccupations, to reduce all of our pursuits to naught. But letter-writing requires solitude. Like all contemplative practices, it can turn absence into bounty, mandatory separation and time's fearsome abyss into the forge of unimagined connection through genuine communication. It does this by cultivating a certain set of mannerisms, a disposition, sensibility. It is tied to the formation of a self, a being whose lifeblood is thought.

Without a notion of the self and self-cultivation, we might, if we are lucky and creative with new sources given the wholesale shift over to electronic communications, still be able to answer the question of how to explore the intellectual past. But will we have any answers as to why?

In the e-revolution, after all, information and what passes for expression abound. But just saying we are communicating does not mean we are. To express something really worth expressing don't we need to give it some thought?

For longer than it takes to write an email?

Inarticulate by Choice: The Decline of Letter Writing and the Future of the Intellectual Past, Part One

Should someone interested in intellectual history be worried about the near demise of letter writing in our lifetimes? In the next couple of posts, I'll offer some of my thoughts on this, for whatever they're worth. Perhaps you will say my affirmative answer is all too predictable, but perhaps my reasons will be of interest to some readers, if only for their humor value or quaintness. Even as I write this I realize how dated my reflections must already sound to some. But to those I say, did you ever think the record player, albums, bell bottoms, and the Beach Boys would have another run? Yes, I am logging one person's protest. But please note that I am not arguing a Luddite either/or position, as cathartic as that might be, but rather making a case for a marriage of ideals, past and present, or at least peaceful coexistence. That would seem preferable to ditching one altogether, on the grounds of irreconcilable differences.

I grew up in a household in which letter writing was at least as common as watching a show on tv; no, even more so. Honestly. I regularly wrote to and received letters from my grandparents, my uncle, and friends out of town even for a few weeks in the summer. Summertime, in fact, was always a great time for letters. Reading or writing them was one of our favorite summer activities, along with swimming, riding horses, reading for fun, and just lying in the long grass watching the clouds go by. (And I didn't even walk to school and back for ten miles in a snowstorm. Ever.) Later additional regular correspondents included my parents, romantic interests, teachers, friends of my family, and others. I still have many of the letters I received. The delivery of the mail each day was always a treat, as you never knew when you might receive a letter or postcard addressed to you personally.

The advent of email thus at first filled me, as it did many others who knew the deep satisfactions of this pursuit, with trepidation. What would a cold, impersonal, and computerized way of communicating do to this beloved part of life, the wellspring of so much joy and meaning?


I still remember experiencing an aversion (gag?) reflex when I first saw an actual email address. An unsightly and awkward non-word, here it was, in all lower-case letters, like the dreamer who shows up on the first day of class without his or her pants. But not a dream. Worse off than being caught in a plain old birthday suit, this figure was deliberately accessorized with the bizarre and, to borrow Lewis Mumford's term, paleo-technic @ mark, and the infantile "dot...dot" (we had learned to call it a period since about age three, after all). It seemed like something a robot would designate an address, hardly comparable with words written out long-hand or typed on an envelope calling up a particular, unique person and a particular, unique place in the world. The integrity and dignity of those names were protected by the buffer and frame of standard spacing and punctuation. We had never begrudged those little spaces the miniscule space they were taking up. We never thought of merging all of the letters and symbols together like some kind of sudden pile-up accident on the highway.

As time went by and it became clear that email was displacing letter-writing as we knew it, I wondered whether I would, could, or should make my peace with this new mode of communicating. I resisted using email as long as possible, until it made such inroads at the workplace as to make it nearly mandatory. When I found that fruitful exchanges with students often occurred on email because they seemed so comfortable with the medium, I became more reconciled to the (no longer new) technology. A few awkward initial work emails morphed into an ever-expanding list of messages to click on and "open" (a faded memory of what it used to mean to open a piece of mail). (Apparently in Poland, anyway, there was initially some controversy over whether "click" was even the proper word, since a mouse does not click so much as squeak). While I suppose I experienced an occasional frisson of excitement on rare occasions when I saw that particular person had written me, the Christmas-morning level of anticipation attending the daily mail was not an intrinsic part of email. Needless to say, when someone attached the "s" word to the word "mail" in a cruel act of name-calling directed at what I had come to treasure as a complete, life-giving practice--it was hardly reducible to just another mode of transporting a piece of freight, with words as the un-precious cargo to be lugged around any old way--I was not amused.

Turning momentarily to the @, the terms used to refer to this "at" sign or "commercial at," as it is known in English, vary greatly from country to country. The LINGUIST LIST website's list gives an entertaining assortment of them here, collected from all over the world. For a lovely commentary, see also this piece from the e-zine of Michael Quinion, British author of Why is Q Always Followed by U? (answers to language questions), Gallimaufry (about words that are vanishing from English), and the UK bestseller Port Out, Starboard Home--in the USA Ballyhoo, Buckaroo, and Spuds--, debunking legends about word origins.

Most commonly, @ is rendered with animal metaphors, such as monkey tail, cat or dog or pig tail, or elephant trunk. Some of my favorites are strudel, little puppy, little kitten, and meow. Can you imagine the possibilities for a fuzzier, furrier future and humbler, humanized technology if we were to start spelling our email addresses with a "meow"? The commercial at instead has connotations of *insert number* at the price of *insert price*. How cold, impersonal, and computerized can you get?

Meow.

But wait! What does Italy call the @ you might ask, and rightly so. It calls it a "chiocciola," the Italian word for snail, especially the shell. A beautiful image. Likewise in Hebrew, Korean, and Esperanto. And French? Mai oui, you are correct. Un escargot! So, who is looking like the real snail now? Or is it already implied; does everyone but me already know e-mail is short for "escargot" mail?

In the last couple of years, I developed a close friendship with a woman twenty years my senior. I had known her for decades but had previously socialized with her only when our two families had gotten together. Discovering one another as true friends, which means also learning the other is capable of doing what it takes to sustain a friendship, has been a joy.

In anticipation of my going out of the country for the Spring 2012 semester, we wondered together over lunch what would be the best way to keep in touch. We both liked the idea of experimenting with exchanging old-fashioned letters. We already had our own preferred and customary forms of communicating--a combination of long, leisurely lunches about every other week, and longish, personalized emails in between only to make arrangements to see one another or to report something of unusual interest like an interesting article, stunning weather, or a wildlife sighting. We had no idea whether we would take to letter writing. We agreed on the experiment only with mutual assurances that if ever it was inconvenient, we should instead fall back on the easier path of enhancing our email communication for the duration of my stay abroad. Here, I'll just report that our experiment was a great success.

But for now I hope you'll join me in considering what alternative to the s-word could help reflect the honorable tradition of exchanging regular mail. Quinion writes, re the @ symbol: "the most-used Hebrew term is strudel, from the famous Viennese rolled-up apple sweet. Another common Swedish name is kanelbulle, 'cinnamon bun', which is rolled up in a similar way." If the cold and distant commercial at, with its echoes of the cash register, is preferred for one of the key building blocks of email, clearly the territory of the warm and charming has been ceded to those who might wish to restore the practice of exchanging old-fashioned letters to its central place in life. Certainly another name for the mail that captures the essence of what is so sublime about a real letter will come to someone's mind. Does anyone have any ideas? Maybe rhyming with email could be just The Mail, with the accent on the "The," pronounced thee. Is this coincidentally apt? Perhaps Thee Mail is just the corrective we need to to e- (me-?) mail.

In the next post I hope to convey some of the differences between letter-writing, as I have just recently re-experienced it, and the use of emails. In doing so I merely add my brief to that of others who have lamented the decline of this delicious pursuit. You might dismiss this, I know, as nothing but nostalgia, another all-purpose epithet designed for just such occasions. But the line between nostalgia and retro isn't always so clear, is it?

To be continued...