Writer's Log, May 28: Handwriting
Writer's Log, May 28: Handwriting
As I write this, I'm sitting across the room from a man who is handwriting a letter. He's got a knapsack and a martini and a huge card that he is filling with microscopic, slanted letters. We are both at an inn in Mendocino County, a gorgeous stretch of coastal land on the western edge of Northern California, where there is nothing to see but the Pacific, and nothing to imagine but the rest of the world on the other side of it.
I try to reserve vacation time for, well, vacationing, but I wanted to seize this fortuitous moment to reach out to you on this topic, as I have been thinking of doing for some time. A while back, I wondered aloud in this space what had happened to the lost art of writing letters. Not that the answer itself is what I'm really seeking -- because the answer could be answered in fairly obvious terms -- but a wonderment about why, in such a tirelessly connected world, the truer connection are falling further and further into obscurity.
And then this afternoon, at a bookstore, I came across an entire wall of beautiful stationery, which I didn't buy, but now that I've been visited by this letter-writing familiar, I think I might have to go back and choose the honeybee print from the twenties, evocative of wood and sunshine. But somehow that doesn't feel exactly like what I want to do, though it represents a small part of it -- what I really want to do is to be a part of a movement that gets all of us writing to each other again. Maybe just once a month, to someone we love very much who lives far away; maybe weekly, to a pen pal. There are so many possibilities, so many small ways we can begin to reclaim our slower, more thoughtful ways with words. Might today be the day we begin?
As I write this, I'm sitting across the room from a man who is handwriting a letter. He's got a knapsack and a martini and a huge card that he is filling with microscopic, slanted letters. We are both at an inn in Mendocino County, a gorgeous stretch of coastal land on the western edge of Northern California, where there is nothing to see but the Pacific, and nothing to imagine but the rest of the world on the other side of it.
I try to reserve vacation time for, well, vacationing, but I wanted to seize this fortuitous moment to reach out to you on this topic, as I have been thinking of doing for some time. A while back, I wondered aloud in this space what had happened to the lost art of writing letters. Not that the answer itself is what I'm really seeking -- because the answer could be answered in fairly obvious terms -- but a wonderment about why, in such a tirelessly connected world, the truer connection are falling further and further into obscurity.
And then this afternoon, at a bookstore, I came across an entire wall of beautiful stationery, which I didn't buy, but now that I've been visited by this letter-writing familiar, I think I might have to go back and choose the honeybee print from the twenties, evocative of wood and sunshine. But somehow that doesn't feel exactly like what I want to do, though it represents a small part of it -- what I really want to do is to be a part of a movement that gets all of us writing to each other again. Maybe just once a month, to someone we love very much who lives far away; maybe weekly, to a pen pal. There are so many possibilities, so many small ways we can begin to reclaim our slower, more thoughtful ways with words. Might today be the day we begin?
No comments have been added yet.
