I recently read ‘To the Letter – a journey through a vanishing world’ by Simon Garfield. It’s far from the best book I’ve read all year, but it caught my eye when I saw a review in the Gulf News, and it was a subject that I was interested in. Should we still be writing personal letters? One of the unexpected benefits of reading the book was discovering great letter writers of old. What makes letters special I think is their very personal quality, and I found it remarkable reading letters from the 18th century (esp. Chesterfield) and love letters from World War Two (which are scattered throughout the book). You can sense the very human nature of their authors. Despite it being an obvious truth, we so easily dismiss people in the past as being of a very different species, but letters more than anything highlight just how real they were. When we fall in love we think it’s the most magical unrepeatable experience, but it’s actually something that’s been felt a hundred million times by other people. It also shows how many of the ideas we think original have long ago been expressed and thought up. Nothing under the sun has not already appeared.

Nostalgia is a dangerous thing, but I do feel there was a time when my email inbox was full of messages from real friends, which is so rarely the case now; it’s all mailing lists and Google Alerts. I don’t think that’s just because I’ve moved overseas. Part of my motivation for reading the book was to know if I should do more letter writing and if the form is possible with email. The author seems to think letter writing is dying out, though he does say that people have been saying this for centuries. Physical letters do give you something that’s imminently keep-able. I do hope to start a ‘tiny letter’ soon though.

Just got a spam email…the saddest thing about getting a spam message from a contact’s hacked email account is not that there are strangers out there trying to exploit your naivety. But rather, that it would have been so wonderful to get a genuine personal email from that old friend, even asking for help returning from a far off land, and you feel a touch of sorrow that it wasn’t really them getting back in touch.

Out of the blue a couple of weeks back I was contacted by the father of my ex-girlfriend (there is only one person in this category). It got me thinking about someone that I haven’t thought about for a long time. She was really someone very special.

We met on a weekend away with friends just before I moved to Africa, and during my year in Congo we wrote to each other regularly. She had a beautiful soul, fascinated by the deep mysteries of life and faith. She’d send me handwritten letters with poems she’d appreciated, we’d talk about life, and she encouraged me to stay in Congo in those inevitable first few weeks when I had my doubts. I felt I’d met a kindred soul, sharing the magic of quotes, poems, music and books.

At distance, she became my closest friend for 11 months. Then, when we met during a holiday we convinced each other to try going out for a trial month. A month later, at distance, we concluded things couldn’t work, and the relationship (romance and friendship) ended there, rather sharply, though to my knowledge, without bitterness. In some respects it’s a sad tale – such friends and soul-mates are rare. But I wanted also to celebrate something very beautiful in its time.

I was reading the local paper a few weeks back and stumbled on the best sellers list for fiction and non-fiction. I find it useful to check up on what people are buying, as it’s not the sort of thing it’s easy to keep in touch with if you’re not wandering into book stores. Listening to the podcasts I tend to get, you’d think Clive James’ new translation of The Divine Comedy would be the talk of the town. But when you come to best sellers lists it tends to be the Dan Brown’s Infernos of this world that tend to dominate.

Anyway, it’s good to come across new things and I was interested to see a book called ‘Quiet’ at number 2 in the non-fiction list, sub-titled ‘The Power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking’. Such being the ease of capitalism nowadays, it was on my Kindle within a couple of minutes.

The book has been a very insightful read, as much as you’d enjoy reading about the positive qualities of any particular group that you happen to belong to. Here’s a sample paragraph:

« Introverts, in contrast, may have strong social skills and enjoy parties and business meetings, but after a while wish they were home in their pajamas. They prefer to devote their social energies to close friends, colleagues, and family. They listen more than they talk, think before they speak, and often feel as if they express themselves better in writing than in conversation. They tend to dislike conflict. many have a horror of small talk, but enjoy deep discussions. »

I wouldn’t want to read my whole life through the lens of the book, but I’ve definitely found some of the content useful to understanding myself, especially how introverts draw so much inspiration and strength from the internal life, while extroverts need social interaction. it made me feel less like a social failure when I feel that I sometimes need reflective times alone and that it’s not always wrong to avoid the crowd. It made me appreciate why I need a few close friends rather than a wide number of contacts (FB friends don’t count). In the fight for equality, we get constantly told that we’re all the same, when in fact we actually have subtly different ways of functioning and need different stimuli.