The Habit of Being a Person
A bonus essay on being forced to slow down, what nostalgia smells like, and why we should keep writing letters.
Okay, folks. The bonus section is really coming into its own. What started as an occasional insight into deleted scenes from the essays has grown into something bigger and, I think, more interesting. If you’re a paying subscriber, you’re getting much more these days. In addition to reading behind-the-scenes material, you’re now geting whole essays that stand beside the most recent public essay. These are not alternatives to what you’ve already read, but fully developed essays that have their own central ideas.
I wanted to let all of my readers get a taste of what’s happening behind the paywall. As well as these bonus essays, I’ve started a new column called THE ROUND-UP. (The first edition is here, and the second will be out in a couple of weeks.) Right now, these are available to all readers, but soon they’ll be published for paying subscribers only.1
Thank you again, sincerely, if you are a paying subscriber. If you’re not and would like to be able to read everything published on Volumes, you can upgrade by clicking the button below. It only costs £5 a month, or £50 pounds for the year.
Happy reading!
Dear reader,
I have a collection of letters that have remained with me through the passage of decades. Some were written by people near the end of their lives and read when I was young and life was mostly ahead of me. Many of them have flown across oceans in their stamped and hand addressed envelopes, from Canada, America, China to England, the world out there brought here to my town. Today, these letters are gathered together in a small drawer that smells like pencil shavings and incense, which for me is the scent of nostalgia. When I open this drawer, it takes most of an afternoon to spread these pages out and make acquaintance once again with people I used to know and people I used to be. I know that if my house were on fire, these letters would be among the very first things I’d grab as I ran out the door.
I also have a folder on my computer, a folder that has migrated across several devices and grows slowly in megabytes, which contains emails and messages from friends and family. When I closed my social media accounts, I copy-pasted a bunch of my message threads into several Word documents so I could keep their record. I deeply value these too, yet I open these files even less frequently than I open that wood-scented drawer, and when I do, far less feeling is evoked. It’s an amuse-bouche of emotion compared to the three-course meal of nostalgia, happiness, and melancholy I get from the physical letters.
In any case, these letters make up the majority of all the sentimental things I insist on preserving. Why do I keep this collection? Generic sentimentalism, or something more specific? I think it’s this: a letter is the visible evidence of a mind at work. In many cases, it’s the only record of the development of an idea, nurtured within the self-dialogue on the page, then Socratically refined over the tennis-match of letters sent back and forth.
I have a friendship that exists entirely within letters. Technically, they’re emails, but the tone and nature of them is far more suggestive of a traditional letter. Rather than the abbreviated, terse styling we all fall into when using emails or direct messaging, our correspondence is digressive, open-ended, concerned with thinking more than where our thought arrives. There are recurrent themes that linger between our lines, that fade into the background and later bloom into the foreground again. Our deepest interests, and sometimes our biases, are revealed to each other and to ourselves.
One of our running themes is the nature of writing letters and the demands it makes on us. My friend is a philosopher and poet, and these parts of her identity make for wonderful reading whenever I get a letter from her. In one, she opened with the kind of mea culpa we’re both prone to making about how much time often passes between replies from either of us:
Dear Matthew,
Each time I write to you, I think “why did I take so long to respond?” I really do hope to do better next time; there is no excuse really, except that I get out of the habit of being a person, and letter-writing of this sort requires a level of personhood.
“I get out of the habit of being a person” — how wonderful is that! And then in a follow-up letter:
Dear Matthew,
Always an ungodly delay from my end, isn’t there? I won’t cite excuses, but I will indulge a little context (if there’s a meaningful difference between the two). First, there’s the difficulty of keeping up the duty of self-expression, as we’ve written about before. [...] Second, these days there is so little time that I feel my limitations sharply, and am sometimes paralyzed into silence rather than selective/limited self-expression.”
I’d never be able to express in speech what she expresses so cogently here in writing. And I certainly wouldn’t be able to express it — off the cuff in a telephone conversation — as eloquently as she does on the page. The written word grants a lucidity absent in speech.
I’m forced to repeat myself annoyingly often in a phone call. I forget that I’ve already made a particular point (while in the re-reading of a letter’s first draft I can excise the duplication); my friend missed what I said because of patchy reception (never a problem with a typed letter, and only rarely a problem with handwriting); I remember some missing context or a qualification I hasten to staple inelegantly onto my makeshift sentences. The result is not clarity, but an inebriating blend of fuzzy notions, wild ideas, and half-formed theories.
Writing, on the other hand, requires time. It forces the mind to slow down, to match the crawl of the hand, the scratch of the pen across paper. In that delay between idea and expression lies space for self-interrogation, to peel back the top layer laid down in words to find something more profound, something truer, beneath. And having an idea on the page allows a chance to edit and sharpen it into a better idea, or at least give it better expression. In her essay “On Letter Writing”, Vivian Gornick describes this process:
“I treasured these hours between the time I got a letter and the time I answered it. I loved ordering my thoughts, savouring the agenda. What did I want to say and in what order would I say it? How would I arrange fact and impression to let my friend know how things were with me: describe a mood, pass on information, think out loud about a book or an event, build an atmosphere on the page larger than the facts.”
This is part of what’s lost in abandoning the act of writing: the translation of information into narrative. As Gornick writes, “To transmit is one thing, to narrate another — comparable but not interchangeable. Choosing between them is like choosing between work and love: either way, it’s half a life.” She explains:
“Transmission is a series of connecting signals sent out across the exploratory surface. Narration is a road cut in the wilderness. Both are wanted in a life. Each alone is an insufficiency of experience. One replaces the other only at great cost, but we seem always to be living in a world that tells us both are uneconomical, one or the other will do.”
If you only need to alter a date or confirm a plan, there’s no harm in tapping out your note on your phone and hitting send. But let’s not confuse that with what we can achieve when we sit to think and then write and edit our thoughts. On feeling the urge to write a letter rather than simply making a call, Gornick writes:
“I wanted to describe the light in my room as I was writing, the air as it had felt when I came home, an exchange I had just had in the elevator. I wanted, in short, to narrate not to transmit; to enlarge upon the moment; impose shape; achieve form. It would be a different piece of information my friend would then receive, coming through the mail rather than over the phone, the kind of information one might get from a poem not a memo: a piece of intimacy I wanted to offer her, to extend myself.”
Here is the evidence of a mind, of a person, one who exists and persists in the written letter. It isn’t information — it’s a story. It isn’t the mere fact that X is inviting you to dinner on a certain date; it’s why they thought of you in the first place, how they arrived at their food plans, scraps of remembered intimacies and in-jokes and shared stories.
That’s why I have no problem throwing out generic invite-cards, or deleting two-word texts or messages displaying only a “thumb up” icon (surely the bottom of our social barrel in the degradation of dialogue). It’s also why I keep those long, intentional letters that show me the mind of a loved one at work. And, at the risk of getting sentimental before I sign off, it shows me that somebody cared enough to make the effort to write. I recommend it to you as well — show someone that you care enough to write.
All the best,
Matthew
As I wrote in the first edition of The Round-Up:
“I put my entire life into building Volumes, and I am infinitely glad that anybody with an internet connection can read so much of my work for free. But some of that labour must earn me a living, or none of it will be able to continue.”