Reading Someone Else's Letters
I read a volume of collected letters this spring, the letters of one person to another across about thirty years, and it changed the way I think about time on the page.
A novel tells you that a year passed. A letter cannot do that. Every letter is dated, and the date is not decoration; it is the whole instrument. You are given Friday the ninth, and you are told what the weather was, what the writer had eaten, whom they had seen that afternoon. Then you turn the page and it is the Monday after, and there is no way to hurry the two of them together. Somebody has to have written all those Mondays. That is the effect I have never been able to get from fiction.
Reading them in order is the important part. Over the volume the writer changes and the change is not announced; you find it in the punctuation. The early letters are full of exclamation marks and jokes at their own expense. Somewhere in the middle the jokes dry up, not because the writer has been hurt but because there is simply less time, and by the end a letter to the same person is four lines long and the four lines are entirely about a garden.
Then there is the outside world leaking in. A new job, a death, an election the letters mention once, in a parenthesis, and that we now know was enormous. Nothing in the letters marks it. That is the strange part. They are written by someone having a Tuesday, and we read them forty years later and can see the whole shape of the decade pressing down on one person's ordinary days.
What it does to a reader is to make time feel hand-made and local. A novel gives you atmosphere; letters give you the day. I have caught myself since then doing something I did not used to do: reading my own notebook as if it were mail, and being startled that the person who wrote it had no idea what was coming.
There is a practical habit I have taken from it too. I read a letter before I write one, even a note to a tradesman, and try to put in it the one true detail that would make it worth reading later. Almost never, but the attempt changes the writing.