letter
The telephone conversation is, by its very nature, reactive, not reflective. Immediacy is its prime virtue. The immediacy delivers quick company, instant stimulation; the stimulation is cathartic; catharsis pushes back anxiety; into open space flows the kind of thought generated by electric return. The letter, written in absorbed solitude, is an act of faith: it assumes the presence of humanity: world and self are generated from within: loneliness is courted, not feared.
“Letters are Acts of Faith; Telephone Calls Are a Reflex,” The New York Times, July 31, 1994.
I think van Gogh was one of the great, great draftsmen. I love the little sketches in his letters, which seem like drawings of drawings. They are condensed versions of the big pictures he was painting at the time, so that Theo and the other people he was writing to could understand what he was doing. These days he’d be sending them on his iPhone. When you look at them, they contain everything. It’s all there. He certainly didn’t do anything by halves.
A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney, by Martin Gayford (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2011), 187.
Please never stop writing me letters—they always manage to make me feel like my higher self…
Letter to Robert Lowell, August 26, 1963, in Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 332.
Letters by a living man are a bit like a stately home with the owner around—one isn’t sure how much one can touch.
“Letters of E. B. White,” in The Good Word and Other Words (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978), 252.
The arrival of letters was the first grand object of every morning’s impatience.
Pride and Prejudice: A Novel in Three Volumes, Vol. 3 (London: Printed for T. Egerton, Military Library, Whitehall, 1813), 115.
A good book of letters beats an almost-good novel any day.
“Friends Who Didn’t Mince Words,” The New York Times, December 9, 2010.
Send me a little note, old pal. Remember you occupy one of the top compartments of my heart.
Letter to Samuel Freifeld, dated November 5, 1955, in Saul Bellow: Letters (New York: Viking, 2010), 142.
As ever (whatever that is),
The closing of the letter to John Hunt, dated September 13, 1995, in Saul Bellow: Letters (New York: Viking, 2010), 509.
The age of the literary correspondence is dying, slowly but surely electrocuted by the superconductors of high modernity. This expiration was locked into certainty about 20 years ago; and although William Trevor and V.S. Naipaul, say, may yet reward us, it already sounds fogeyish to reiterate that, no, we won’t be seeing, and we won’t be wanting to see, the selected faxes and e-mails, the selected texts and tweets of their successors.
His review of Philip Larkin’s Letters to Monica, Guardian, October 23, 2010.
I don’t think I like writing letters in type. It is slow, and then it seems so terribly public. I am shocked at what I put down, as though it had appeared in the newspapers. Also, it looks too permanent, too definite and irrefutable. It embarrasses me, too, like talking over the long-distance telephone.
Locked Rooms and Open Doors: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh 1933–1935 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 127.