Wednesday, December 2, 2009
"Nostalgia Ain't What It Used to Be"
I was reminded of this Yogi Berra quote when reading Yours Ever by Thomas Mallon, as one of the readers for the Arts Club of Washington's literary award. The book reviews famous correspondents as diverse as H.L. Mencken and Heloise and Abelard. Mallon laments the instantaneous nature of email as opposed to the lags in letter writing when recipients would be reacting to events long past, or commentaries on the same event would cross in the mails. The letter writers themselves constantly lament the delays for which Mallon expresses nostalgia. Mallon also feels that electronic communication has degraded the population's writing ability; I think that is debatable because more people communicate in writing on a daily basis than ever before. It could be argued that the telephone degraded writing more than email has. Ah, readers, do you write more and better, less or less and worse in this new age? Do you lament the lags in communication when separated from your correspondents?
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Interesting thought! Having read recently several historical books on the likes of Andrew Jackson which were written largely based upon letters, the thought came to mind that such historical texts would be restricted to those times when the primary means of communication was letter writing. This is similar to the "walking cities" being only those which predate the automobile. Now that people have begun to write again, this problem may resolve itself if there is a means of and a desire to save the texts of all this email.
ReplyDeleteAs a working historian, I have been reading 19th century family letters for many years, but it has only been recently that I have admitted to myself that most of them are intensely boring. They describe crops, illnesses. births, deaths, and engagements ad infinitum. It has been even more recently that I have discovered a reason for this. I was going through some letters written in the 1870s by three sisters living in Mexico to a girlhood friend in Texas, and I came across the line, "Well, I must fill my paper up so I will tell you about Brother Bud" I think that for many correspondents letter-writing was a duty, not a pleasure, and a great deal of meaningless information was exchanged so that the writers could "fill their paper up."
ReplyDeleteI have written a weekly letter for years, first to my parents and then, after their deaths, to a series of their contemporaries who expressed a desire to hear from me on a regular basis. Of course, none of my letters are boring - they all sparkle with wit and will be treasured by their recipients and their descendants for many years.
I do think that e-mail and letters are two completely different genres. I regard e-mail as a telegraphic means of communication, suitable for making appointments and exchanging very short messages, while letters are a way to express thoughts and feelings. I don't think e-mail will ever replace letters. But then, I don't think Kindles will ever replace books, either.
Lonn Taylor