Clippings

Posts for Tag: Handwritten

Letters

Peter Lloyd writes When anyone bemoans the death of letter writing, perhaps I should direct the conversation to letter reading. Who reads them?, gives a shocking example, and suggests several sources to follow up.

I sent hand-written letters to several colleagues at a digital marketing agency. None of them read my missives. The letters arrived but languished in mailroom pigeon holes. “I don't ever go get my snail-mail,” one of my addressees explained, when I asked him if he had received my traditional letter. I meant for it to stand out from all the electronic messages I know he receives.

Another statement, Letters may prove more thoughtful and intimate, but it's stimulation variety we seem to crave today, sees to echo Sherry Turkle's op-ed earlier this week.

A trip to my archives

Recorded in March at Tumblr   

“Writing things down enforces slowness, and by extension, thoughtfulness.”

Elizabeth Spiers on keeping a notebook in the digital age. Complement with Joan Didion on keeping a notebook, Virginia Woolf on keeping a diary, and Mary Gordon on writing by hand. (via explore-blog)

To the Letter

Maria Popova tells the story of her great-grandfather and a misdelivered letter; she goes on to offer an appreciation of Simon Garfield's To the Letter. I've heard Garfield interviewed a out the book, and I've already got it on my shortlist of books to buy. Popova's piece is a fine introduction to what to expect. She writes in part:

Garfield attributes a good deal of the humanity of the letter — something he so poetically terms its “physical candor and the life-as-she-is-suffered quality” — to the tangibility of how it travels from sender to recipient. Though we know a great more today about how information travels on the internet, Garfield argues for an “intrinsic integrity” that letters hold over other modes of communication and explains:

Some of this has to do with the application of hand to paper, or the rolling of the paper through the typewriter, the effort to get things right first time, the perceptive gathering of purpose. But I think it also has something to do with the mode of transmission, the knowledge of what happens to the letter when sealed. We know where to post it, roughly when it will be collected, the fact that it will be dumped from a bag, sorted, delivered to a van, train or similar, and then the same thing the other end in reverse. We have no idea about where email goes when we hit send. We couldn’t track the journey even if we cared to; in the end, it’s just another vanishing. No one in a stinky brown work coat wearily answers the phone at the dead email office. If it doesn’t arrive we just send it again. But it almost always arrives, with no essence of human journey at all. The ethereal carrier is anonymous and odorless, and carries neither postmark nor scuff nor crease. The woman goes into a box and emerges unblemished. The toil has gone, and with it some of the rewards....

Garfield’s core argument, while anchored a tad too stubbornly and narrowly to the preservation of letters as a medium, speaks powerfully to a broader urgency — the increasingly endangered species of meticulous, thoughtful self-revelation and deep mutual understanding through the written word in the age of reactionary responses and knee-jerk replies. He captures this beautifully:

Great miserabilist that he was, Philip Larkin was spot-on with his famous line from ‘An Arundel Tomb’ … what will survive of us is love. Letters fulfill and safeguard this prophecy. Without letters we risk losing sight of our history, or at least its nuance. The decline and abandonment of letters — the price of progress — will be an immeasurable defeat.

The faintest ink is better than the best memory

Productive people keep better notes, we've learned, since notetaking allows us to continually improve our understanding of the world, for just as "successful students continue to improve their mastery of the concepts from previous chapters and courses as they move toward the more advanced material on the horizon; successful people regularly focus on the core purpose of their profession or life."

Or, as a Chinese proverb says, "The faintest ink is better than the best memory."

via Fast Company's appreciation of Marie Curie at Tumblr