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 ...
Blog of a struggling writer.