Solitude

I was in the stationery store this afternoon, stocking up on cards and letter paper, and the woman behind the counter asked me what I planned to do with all my purchases. I responded, surprised that there was any other option, that I planned to “send letters to friends, of course.”

It turns out that this was not a customary response, and the woman behind the counter went on to ask me about my epistolary habits at length. Anyone who knows me well knows that I send letters, between 300 and 400 a year, to friends and loved ones; I was glad to share the details of that habit with this woman who seemed delighted to hear it all.

In Solitude, Michael Harris spends an entire chapter writing about letters; since reading it, I have been thinking a lot about why I love to send correspondence in the post, and why this has been the one habit of mine I have kept going since my childhood. There are, of course, many answers to this question, but one of them is clearly that I love the process of letter-writing. I love what it evokes inside me, I love what it makes me feel about the person I am writing to, and I love how it acts as this quasi-spiritual bridge between us, and between our inner lives.

Harris summed it up pretty well in his book:

A letter is an act of faith—the solitary letter writer, working for hours, perhaps, at a single expression from one human heart to another, must assume a connection to someone who is absent and non-responsive for maybe weeks at a time. As the critic Vivian Gornick has it: “To write a letter is to be alone with my thoughts in the conjured presence of another person. I keep myself imaginative company. I occupy the empty room. I alone infuse the silence.” One presses beyond the happenstance of spoken speech (and the casual reassurances of texting and email) into an ordered expression of things that requires removal from chatter. And yet that conjured person does sit by our side. When we take the time to write long letters to those we care about, we uncover a part of them that was not revealed before, not at dinner parties, nor cafés, nor even lying together in rumpled sheets.

Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Much has been said about giving John Lasseter a “second chance.” But he is presumably being paid millions of dollars to receive that second chance. How much money are the employees at Skydance being paid to GIVE him that second chance?

Thompson walked away from a film she wanted to do and a director with whom she wanted to work because “no” means “no,” and it needed to be said in terms that Hollywood can understand.

I know that you are not made of celestial ether, but he doesn't. A suggestion that you have normal functions would shock him deeply and I'm not going to be the one to tell him.

The letter is, above all else, generous. Even when he mentions an egregious comment Madonna made in an interview — “I'm off to rehabilitate all the rappers and basketball players” — he does so only to elucidate that the words were a blow to his heart and ego that resulted in his saying things he came to regret.

What's more remarkable than what's written is what isn't. Tupac does not overstep the bounds of being an ex-lover. He does not push a selfish agenda. He has the wisdom to balance what he wants with what is warranted after leaving sans explanation. He does not burden her by asking for her forgiveness.

Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Solitude

In the solitary composition of our love letters we heal wounds and bridge distances. When we write them we experience communion within our solitude.

A wonderful study of the lack of solitude in our lives. A lot about how technology affects our ability to be alone (like, really alone, without the internet!) and how that is probably a bad thing but not absolutely. It changes us, though, and perhaps not always for the better.

I liked the earlier parts of the book best where Harris explores the uses of solitude and the benefits of daydreaming. The last section on ‰ЫПKnowing Others‰Ыќ (excepting the final chapter) doesn‰ЫЄt fit as neatly with the rest of the book as I expected, although it wasn‰ЫЄt out of place exactly.

An engaging and fascinating book with lots of tasty morsels for further contemplation.