The Art of Letters

So I come home and find a letter from Nessa waiting for me. Letters are always nice. At the beginning of this year, I wrote up a storm, a letter a day, and I usually inserted an origami figure that I made.

Since then, I have grown lax about it....but this letter, which must be answered, fills me with delight. There is so much she has to say...and she takes five handwritten pages to say it. I notice that when people first begin writing old fashioned letters, there is a lack of ease and fluidity until they settle in to the rhythms, start an actual conversation, talk deeply about what matters to them.

Virginia Woolf used to write two or three letters every day in the morning. These letters were, more often than not, delightful. This was although she was on the telephone, meaning that she had one installed. It did not replace good old-fashioned letters, where news could be relayed with panache and humour.

This is Nessa's second letter to me and she seems to have relaxed into depth. I feel her emotions as I read it. Of course, that could be because she's a writer. But it could be because we've started a conversation across the miles. I delight in it.

And also pictured above is a book that I stumbled across in Borders. Jill Bolte Taylor's My Stroke of Insight which I can't wait to finish reading.

And there is the Kalahari Typing School for Men, the fourth in the series...it's an addiction, an obsession, pure pleasure.

I've finished my Martha Beck. But you know what? I'm going to go right back and re-read it.

That's how good.