I Promise It Gets More Interesting In The Third Paragraph

My roommate wrote her lit thesis on T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets. We had taken a class on Eliot during our Austria semester. It turned out to be more of a philosophy class than a literature class, which is the only reason I got a better grade than she did (I will never live this down), and it was sort of unbearable to sit through, but it gave me a lifelong love for Eliot's work, both poetry and prose. Her paper--which was fantastic, naturally--explored Eliot's approach to words. In one sentence: she argued that Eliot's work reveals his belief that words have meaning and that they are, as such, a means of communion between persons and between man and God.

Eliot's thought here lines up perfectly with Thomistic metaphysics. It's complicated and I don't pretend to fathom it, but to my understanding it works something like this: a word is the expression of an image--a "phantasm"--some reality that has impressed itself upon the mind of the speaker. The word begins as internal and then becomes external as it is expressed, for example in speech or writing. By its meaning, the word then carries the original image from the mind of the speaker to the mind of the hearer/reader, at which point the word forms an image/imprint/phantasm in the mind of the other. There's a fun Latin phrase that describes the nature of what happens here (major brownie points to the first person to name it in the comments--I'll update with it later if no one guesses), but the English is: whatever is received is received according to the mode of the receiver. It sounds complicated but basically what it means is that when the expressed word, which is encountered in the mode of sound waves or of ink on a page, is encountered by the hearer/reader, it enters the mind of the receiver and thenceforth has the form of an interior word--a thought--that is in fact alive, as part of the receiver. When we consider that the initial interior word still dwells in the mind of the speaker, we see something amazing. If the word is true, well-chosen, then the word as expressed and received takes something that lives in one human person and makes it live, simultaneously, in another human person. The souls of speaker and hearer, or reader and writer, are in actuality united through the word.

I will resist the temptation to apologize for that little philosophy lesson--after all, I think The Rules say that it's my prerogative to write about anything I want on my own blog--but just in case anyone's wondering WHY I wrote it: I got some letters in the mail today! I've been receiving letters all summer, actually, probably because for the first time in four years I've actually had the time to write letters with some degree of regularity. (A Hint About Letters, From Which You Can Extrapolate Profound Lessons For Life In General: if you like to get letters in the mail, and you wonder why you never get any, try writing some of your own and sending them to friends and family. Just a thought.) I love letters for many reasons, some of which are more profound than others. I love stationery--in fact, stationery is one of the few things that tempt me to covetousness--and it's a lot easier to justify buying pretty stationery if I, you know, actually use it. I love to write. I love pretty pens. I love the experience of sitting outside with a glass of wine or a cup of coffee and a notebook.

More than anything else, though, I love the way that letters connect me to the people I love. Technology provides lots of convenient and wonderful ways to keep in touch with people and I gladly use them all, but there's something different about letters. For one thing, handwriting is significant, especially when it's familiar; an elegant script or a cheerful print can set the whole tone of a letter. There's something meaningful about the slowness of it--slower to write, slower to read--that makes the words seem dearer, more valuable because they have been so carefully chosen. And the words are always there, to be taken out again and pondered, a lasting channel of communion between author and addressee.