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One category of Brunoiana that I had expected to find, and did find in wholesale quantities, was his letters: written in a romantic, looping, leaning, hard-to-read 19th-century hand, each one customised (and therefore made uniformly, unmistakably, instantly recognisable as his product) with endless figures and doodles in the margins. Most were unfinished and without any apparent intention of being sent to the addressee. These letters were really a place to try out ideas, to weigh the escapades of the heart, no different from letters written to oneself (indeed there are some in Bruno's notebooks frankly addressed, "Dear Notebook" or "Dear Letter").
-Isabel Fonseca, writing about her late brother Bruno, in "Dear Brother" [1]
I used to write letters. Longhand. For years, I kept up a variety of correspondences with family, friends, and girlfriends. The Internet wasn't yet a thing, or at least not a thing I or anyone I knew had access to. Long distance calls were expensive. And I was splitting the year between two different cities in those days so there was always one group or another I was separated from. Plus there were all those friends who went away to school in different places. And the months-long trips through Europe and Asia that required lots of reporting back.
My favourite letter form was the diary. Each day I would write a couple of paragraphs about things I had seen or done, and eventually I'd bundle it all up, stuff it in an envelope, and mail it to the fortunate(?) recipient. It wasn't just a personal affectation, this was a thing our friend group did, and I got a fair number of similar letters in return. I misplaced most of them over the years, but I still have a few. Re-reading them now they're like time capsules of a long vanished past. Were we really ever that young, incautious, and self-involved?
My letter writing ended around the time I got my first email account. I am not sure email was entirely to blame - I was more settled, and it no longer seemed imperative to keep in close touch with friends from earlier years, as we all drifted apart into different lives. But email was definitely a factor. I tried to write my first few email messages like they were letters, but it quickly became apparent that made no sense. You could justify bundling up diary entries into 10 page letters because envelopes and postage cost money, but email was a different medium. Messages aren't letters, and even my most lengthy, rambling, tldr messages are marvels of brevity compared to the letters I used to write. Brevity, but also superficiality.
Of course, the arrival of email didn't preclude the possibility of old school letter-writing. Paper, pens, envelopes and stamps, and even the post office - all these things exist. But somehow, it didn't matter. No one was writing letters anymore, and the one time I tried (sitting in the café, ballpoint in hand) it felt curiously artificial, and oddly pointless. For me at least, the era of long-form letter writing had come to an end.
Always late to the party, it wasn't until 2010 or so that I got into blogging. For a while I kept two blogs going - a personal blog, chronicling my then-resurgent interest in painting pictures, and a work blog, writing from an on-the-ground perspective about how developments in technology were changing the nature of academic libraries. Neither one had much of an audience - over three or four years I think I got maybe five comments that weren't blog spam. The former ended when I ran out of things to write about, as my always-fickle attention turned to other interests, and the latter wound down when my new boss said she thought blogging about work stuff was a waste of time. To be fair, she wasn't saying that about my blog specifically, but the message was received nonetheless. By one metric, she was absolutely right: it was clear that few people were reading what I was writing.
But maybe the size of the audience was never the point. My long, rambling letters were addressed to exactly one person, as were their replies to me. All those essays I wrote in university also had an audience of one, namely the prof who was being paid to read them. The few academic papers I've written, though open to the world, would be of interest to no more than a couple of dozen people.
So why write anything at all? The quotation that begins this entry suggests the answer: "... to try out ideas, to weigh the escapades of the heart ..." Even though the old heart is having few escapades these days, I still like to try out ideas. Writing for an audience, no matter how small, theoretical, or imaginary, inspires me to weigh and structure my ideas in a way that entirely private jottings in a notebook would not. Sometimes in the course of writing things down I'll even change my mind about what I was going to say, my train of thought taking me to a different station that the one I bought a ticket for, as it were. I find the process interesting enough that I'll likely keep coming back to it, in one form or another.
[1] Dear Brother, Isabel Fonseca, Guardian, Nov 4 2000
Dear Internet I'm writing to you because was published on 2022-04-21