Implications

Writing is an activity with implications.  Many of us jot things down on a regular basis—reminders, tweets, stories, dissertations; people are frequently writing.  While letter writing may not be the practice that it used to be (although some of us still regularly write and mail letters) we know that the sacred code is that what we put in that envelope is private.  It is, guaranteed by the government, our own business.  That’s what makes a recent story of a trove of undelivered letters such an interesting tale.

The postmasters of The Hague in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, kept a truck of undelivered mail.  Now academics are using high tech scanning devices to read the letters without opening them.  You can’t slander the dead.

I do wonder, however, about private words.  Most of what we write on our computers, I suspect, will simply vanish some day.  Internet fame seems like it must be temporary.  Still, writing reveals quite a lot when it’s found.  Perhaps too much.

Writers write to be read.  We also write some things in secret.  I have written many stories I intend for no one ever to see.  Some of the thoughts, which cry out for expression, are for private expression alone.  What would I think if someone read them when I’m gone?

The reason you can’t slander the dead, of course, is that they can take no legal action against you.  I do wonder about those women writing to the fathers of their unacknowledged children.  Would they have even penned the words had they known strangers in the future would avidly read them?  What are the things we just can’t put on paper?

Sometimes I stop and think just how dangerous writing can be.  Thoughts are one of the truly private things we can have.  Putting them down for others to read open you up to all kinds of vulnerable situations.  My academic papers have been criticized from time to time.  I have to wonder what people think of my fiction.

I know, of course, what the vast majority of editors think.  Not worth publishing.  Still, the words exist and centuries after I’m gone I wonder if anyone will be interested in reading them then?