Letters

[osprey_archer]

A telephone conversation with my mother this morning:

Jin: …so when I get home one of my projects is figuring out a filing system for all the letters I've received, because there are too many for my old filing system.
Mother: Or you could just recycle them.
Jin: Recycle them? Get rid of letters? (beat) (beat) ….do you get rid of my letters?
Mother: Yep!
Jin: O.O
Mother: You write a lot of them, after all.
Jin: O.o
Mother: They’d take up a lot of space.
Jin: o.O
Mother: Honey? You didn’t walk out in traffic or anything, did you?
Jin: >.<

(My mother is like a reverse packrat. I remember once looking for our copy of Rebecca: “Oh, I gave that to the library. No one was reading it.” “Mother! That’s the copy of Rebecca you bought in Suffolk in 1978 on your first trip to England! It still contains your tourist maps because you used them as a bookmark!” My mother gives me a quizzical look. “It has sentimental value, Mom!”)

Anyway. As a result of the scarring conversation about the letters, I am now the proud possessor of a pen-and-paper journal, which no one will ever ever ever throw away. I agonized over stacks of journals (as well as the selection of blank thank-you cards. Who knew thank-you cards were so delectable?) in the local bookstore till I picked out one with a Hiroshige print on the cover.

Van Gogh, incidentally, was a tremendous fan of Hiroshige, which probably influenced my choice. He mentions over and over in his letters that he thinks Arles – Arles is the place in southern France where he lived with Gauguin for three months, and then sliced off his earlobe – that he thinks Arles looks like Japan, he hopes Arles will inspire him like Japan, and look at these gorgeous plum orchards! You could almost imagine you were in Kyoto!

I’m reading a book of his letters, Letters from Provence. It abridges the letters tremendously and doesn’t include any of the replies, which makes me sad; but it does have illustrations and is short enough that I don't feel guilty about reading it during finals week.

And the book is only possible because Van Gogh’s family saved his letters. *grumble grumble grumble*

Comments

[visualthinker11.livejournal.com]

ick, i'm sorry about the lost letters! the journal seems like a genius solution, though.

...i am also in awe and admiration that you still write letters. i've tried, but for some reason correspondence through lengthy e-mails is ten times easier for me to keep up with.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Hee. Well, for correspondence where I actually need an answer, I usually do use email. But I like to write in cafes, and I don't like to haul my computer around, so most of my letters are written there.

[exuberantself.livejournal.com]

As awful as it is that your mother threw away the letters, I think that it's hilarious that her first response was to worry you'd walked into traffic.

Personally, I'm a fan of Franz Kafka's letters. I read them in high school and spent the next four years citing a particular bit of it at every chance I got.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

The traffic line may have been artistic embellishment on my part. But I was definitely Very Indignant, whilst she remained Blithely Innocent.

Franz Kafka has letters? I'm honestly a bit worried what he wrote about. Are they collected in a book?

[exuberantself.livejournal.com]

Mothers are inherently slightly spastic, I think.

Kafka's letters are a little postmodern and a lot emo, but they were pretty interesting at the time. I can't remember if they were part of a larger text or a book of their own, but I got the book from the library and remember thinking how stupid it was when my mom told me that the edges of the pages were misaligned on purpose (supposed to make it look handset or something?). I remember that the letters were written to his friend Max?

My favorite: "For we are abandoned, like children lost in the wood. When you stand before me, and look at me, what do you know of the pains that are in me, and what do I know of yours? And if I were to prostrate myself before you, and weep and talk, would you know any more about me than you know about hell when someone tells you that it is hot and fearsome? For this reason alone we human beings should stand before one another with as much respect, as much sympathy, and as much love as if we were standing before the gates of hell."

But there was also one about how everyone is suspended by ropes above the fires of hell and the only way to keep from falling is the cling to each other..he keeps going and says that women are lighter and that's why men need to love women and women must love men back. The first part is really poetic, but the second is more telling about his views on women.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Somehow it doesn't surprise me that Kafka was like that - both the poetic and the, um, interesting views on women.