This volume brings together a subset of Dickinson's collected letters into one easily digestible book. For the most part, the letters went pretty much as I expected – most were short updates filled with a lot of mundane details about the comings and goings of daily life. However, interspersed in these letters were all kinds of expected surprises – sharp observations about life, little tangents into the mysterious or unknown, and of course, scattered lines and stanzas of poetry.
What do I mean by expected surprises? Well, in the moment, these little phrases and ideas would come out of nowhere – one minute I’m reading about the night’s dinner plans, the next minute I’m learning about the metaphorical value of a flood. I suppose I mean that these letters were filled with spontaneity, the kind that I expected in general yet never could claim to have anticipated at any specific moment.
The spontaneity of these ideas always caught me off guard. But what was I expecting? Spontaneity breathes life into everything. Like I’ve come to learn through the years, the unique characteristic of a living thing is spontaneity. When someone describes a piece of writing as ‘coming alive’ (and this could certainly be said of many of these these letters), I think it means the writer is injecting the same spontaneity into the work that we all value in our social interactions.
One of my favorite examples of the above was her comment on forgetfulness – if a thought leaves the mind, is it oblivion or absorption? I didn’t reach my own conclusion on the thought, reader, just as I couldn’t do much with her logic that being human is preferred to being divine: when Christ was divine, he became human. It was fun to read and think about, however, and that these thoughts came from out of nowhere made them all the more interesting.
A thought that I disagreed with a little bit was her comment that hard work is healthy for the spirit because tired flesh cannot tease the soul with possibility. In my experience, the opposite has been true – fatigue has been my guide into the neglected spaces within. I think this is because a weary body limits my ability to interact with the physical world. As my options for mobility drop away one after another, I’m left with the growing sense that the real work for me will spring from an internal source.
One up: Another example of ‘the expected surprise’ I reference above was how enjoyable some of the writing was. After the fact, of course, it makes sense to me that I would be delighted by Emily Dickinson’s writing – in the moment, though, her expression did catch me unawares, much to the benefit of my reading experience.
I’ll hold back from running out a big list. Here are two of the ones that made me laugh:
Regarding a party that night exclusive for married couples:
"...celibacy excludes me and my sister…"On where home actually is:
"I think it is where the house is, and the adjacent buildings…"One down: As I mentioned above, Dickinson endured a difficult life and much of her loss and grief is reflected in these letters. Even in the cases when her pain was not directly expressed, the melancholy came through in the writing – as I noted after I reread M Train, anything written in the aftermath of a loss is about the loss first and everything else second.
As a reader, I’m grateful for how this unintended work brought her hard-earned lessons to my attention. One such lesson is how a stunning death is always a reminder to love better. She also adds in another letter that being separated from a love brings a pain no alternate activity can alleviate.
These lessons are useful in so many ways. However, I’m not sure if they would resonate with a reader yet to learn them already in some capacity. I came to this conclusion as I pondered her thought that a friendship made in anguish is the slowest one to lose. I think I get the point but I’m struggling to envision how anyone could learn this merely from exposure to the concept. For me, it’s a thought I accept after comparing it against my own recent experience but not an idea I could have done much with a decade ago.
I also mentioned earlier that Dickinson mused at one point about the metaphorical value of a flood. Specifically, she mentioned that the law of floods means when the water is no longer rising, it must be falling. I thought about this but couldn’t quite get the math to work. However, I do recognize the spirit of the idea. When each new loss accumulates with the last into a rising, unstoppable tide of grief and disappointment, the signal of a better day ahead comes not when the water recedes but merely when it is no longer visibly rising.
Just saying: I live with two conflicting beliefs about the letter, those being (a) the handwritten letter is the highest form of human communication and (b) I think writing a letter is a waste of time. As I’ve noted here before, I’m perfectly comfortable living in the conflicted world of 'and' that exists between two contradicting beliefs. However, a part of me did read this collection hoping for some kind of resolution - I would either feel differently about the letter's status as a form of communication or I would shut this blog down in its digital format and start writing proper admins by hand. Neither outcome really came about, however - I still feel pretty good about letters in general but feel no closer to writing one anytime soon.
In the aftermath of this disappointing result, I wondered - will it be possible to compile any book like this one hundred years from now? Surely not, for two reasons. First, no one I know writes letters, which feels relevant but isn't important (because all it would take is one letter-writer to reject my hypothesis). Second, there was nothing here from Dickinson that suggested she wouldn’t have used email if it had been available (and the texting, oh, the texting!). This second thought is perhaps less relevant but more important (because what is implied when I wonder if this kind of book could exist in one hundred years is that the book would be worth reading).
I reached this second thought because at times it in this collection it seemed that Dickinson was against the letter. The closest she came to a wide-ranging comment on the form was her thought that sending a letter away and not having it returned was a wounding experience. Given some of what she endured over the course of her life, it was kind of incredible for her to cite ‘not having a letter returned’ as a wounding experience (though this probably says more about her capacity for self-expression than it does reveal some kind of robust internal ranking system of scars, wounds, and difficulties).
A comment I thought she made that indirectly supported the letter was her stressing the importance of encouraging others to write when they feel like it. I would guess that if she applied this thought to her daily activities, she would consider returning a letter as among the highest priorities because to not do so would be a wounding experience and, by extension, a very discouraging response to someone who is clearly interested in writing.
