Yours Ever (eBook)
360 Seiten
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group (Verlag)
978-0-307-37864-4 (ISBN)
A delightful investigation of the art of letter writing, Yours Ever explores masterpieces dispatched through the ages by messenger, postal service, and BlackBerry.
Here are Madame de Svign's devastatingly sharp reports from the French court, F. Scott Fitzgerald's tormented advice to his young daughter, the casually brilliant musings of Flannery O'Connor, the lustful boastings of Lord Byron, and the prison cries of Sacco and Vanzetti, all accompanied by Thomas Mallon's own insightful commentary. From battlefield confessions to suicide notes, fan letters to hate mail, Yours Ever is an exuberant reintroduction to a vast and entertaining literature--a book that will help to revive, in the digital age, this glorious lost art.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
A delightful investigation of the art of letter writing, Yours Ever explores masterpieces dispatched through the ages by messenger, postal service, and BlackBerry. Here are Madame de Sévigné’s devastatingly sharp reports from the French court, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s tormented advice to his young daughter, the casually brilliant musings of Flannery O’Connor, the lustful boastings of Lord Byron, and the prison cries of Sacco and Vanzetti, all accompanied by Thomas Mallon’s own insightful commentary. From battlefield confessions to suicide notes, fan letters to hate mail, Yours Ever is an exuberant reintroduction to a vast and entertaining literature—a book that will help to revive, in the digital age, this glorious lost art.
It embarrasses me to admit that I began writing this book when a fi,rst-class stamp cost twenty-nine cents. Well, here we are, the price half again as much and I a third again as old, and my excuses no better than what one usually offers when fi,nally answering a letter that's been under the paperweight for ages longer than one ever meant it to be.
But a person can't adequately procrastinate without at least one semi-valid rationalization, and so here's mine: if this book had come out, as it was supposed to, around 1997, it would have appeared just as e-mail was reaching Everyman and beginning to kill, or revive (there are both schools of thought), the practice and art of letter writing. Whichever the case, the book would have come ashore just as a sea change was making the waters even more interesting.
Letters had always defeated distance, but with the coming of e-mail, time seemed to be vanquished as well. It's worth spending a minute or two pondering the physics of the thing, which interested Charles Lamb even early in the nineteenth century. Domestic mail was already a marvel--'One drops a packet at Lombard Street, and in twenty-four hours a friend in Cumberland gets it as fresh as if it came in ice'
And yet, once the sentiment-carrying letter arrives, Lamb will be 'chatting' to his distant correspondent 'as familiarly as when we used to exchange good-morrows out of our old contiguous windows.' The letter will have reconnected them, however imperfectly, by the slenderest and most improbable of threads. With e-mail and its even realer-time progeny, the IM and the text message and the Tweet, we get to ask simply 'how have you been?'--in, that is, the twelve minutes since we were last in touch.
In a history of the mails that he published in the frantic year 1928, Alvin F. Harlow proudly insisted that 'the history of postal service has been the history of civilization,' and he debunked the idea that Queen Atossa, daughter of Cyrus the Great, wrote the fi,rst letter, from Persia, sometime in the sixth century B.C. Mr. Harlow felt certain that these civilizing instruments had been on the road, if not the wing, 'hundreds of years' before that. Setting aside the question of precedence, we do know that Greeks had their fl,eet-footed hemerodromes and the Romans their Cursus publicus for the delivery of communications between one part of the government and another. Couriers and messengers made the Dark Ages a little less so, before Louis XI established what Mr. Harlow calls 'the fi,rst royal, regular message service' in the fi,fteenth century, which allowed Henry VIII to imitate and expand the institution forty years later, across the Channel. Not long after that, private carriers began servicing non-royal folk, bequeathing us the phrase 'post haste'-- a shortening of the injunction ('Haste, Post, haste!') that customers sometimes inscribed on their dispatches.
During the...
| Erscheint lt. Verlag | 10.11.2009 |
|---|---|
| Sprache | englisch |
| Themenwelt | Literatur ► Briefe / Tagebücher |
| Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft | |
| ISBN-10 | 0-307-37864-0 / 0307378640 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0-307-37864-4 / 9780307378644 |
| Haben Sie eine Frage zum Produkt? |
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