Florida Pier : writings and about / jmcvey.net
Typewritten Letters
“The Gentler View,” Harper’s Weekly (January 15, 1910) : 29
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So many of one’s friends are the proud possessors of typewriters, the most feminine of women liking the noisy, commercial things in their rooms, that there can no longer be any feeling about receiving typewritten letters — any feeling, that is, of their being disrespectful, of their demanding a reprimand by way of answer, of their having passed through a third and, according to tradition, chit-like person. Even though they are now written by our friends themselves, they remain calamities, and if they have not been strained for discreet passage through the knowledge of a stenographer they have, such is the effect made upon us, passed through a pitiless machine which has caught and retained in its unpleasant mechanism all the intimacy, all the atmosphere, all the intangible largeness of a written letter. There is no need of a second perusal. You get all there was at a first reading and feel it to have been chillingly meagre. Your acquaintance with the writer’s idiosyncrasies of penmanship after a fashion amusingly measured your honored familiarity. The pride in deciphering, which translated itself into the thrill of understanding, is denied you.
The vagaries of orthography conceal the precise amount of confidence given. In its tangle is the warmth of personality, and the words suffuse a generous more than their bare meaning. The typewriter, on the other hand, has mangled each phrase presented to it, hardened it into a concreteness which has a little paralyzed its message. One could not send an impression into a raucously pattering arrangement of keys and have it come out anything but a compressed, didactic announcement. So that when a letter of this impersonal sort has been read to its end, one’s heart leaping for gratitude at every human misprintone’s heart leaping for gratitude at every human misprint, it is an interview held with a fence between the writer and oneself. Not a charming affair to be peered over, no garden barrier, but a metal obstruction; the kind of thing that in a prison separates prisoner and visitor, bars which permit of a distant, supervised holding of hands, but tantalize, chill, and discipline one’s enjoyment and communion. Though one is of a most sentimental disposition and hopelessly addicted to keeping letters , these big pages with their irritatingly regular blue lines so have the odor of a pamphlet that one tears them up unhesitatingly, feeling that to lock them in a box would be like admitting a bookagent to one’s boudoir.
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Snow is undeniably an indoor recreation. To make any more marked advances to it than attentive gazing through the window is to encourage the familiarity that breeds excessive contempt. If you will be rashly aggressive and fly out-of-doors into the very heart of the snow, you must expect to have your views regarding it undergo a sudden and violent change. One does not fling oneself into the ocean because it is beautiful, or into a fire because one cannot take one’s eyes from it. Why desire greater intimacy with the snow? It is cold, wet, slippery, penetrating, inconvenient matter; it obstructs, retards, and litters. In the country it is exquisitely decorative, and, seen from beside an open fire, looks very well indeed. In the city it is out of place and should not be permitted such full sweep as has been allowed it in the past. Have we not, now that the subject is upon us, rather outgrown weather in the larger towns? Ought it not to be relegated to the country districts where they have time and place for it and still find entertainment in its doddering ways?
While we are about it, let some new arrangement regarding the wind be made. Sailing-ships have almost passed away. What further need is there of our being bothered by the wind, particularly in the city, where nothing looks in the least better for being blown about? In the country, wheat must be prettily ruffled, and it is said that it still depends on the wind to do it, though it does seem as though it might have acquired a little initiative by this time. There are certain trees which trust to the wind to give them distinctive twists, but let them take after the pinettas of Italy, which are never trimmed nowa-days, not even the young ones, but, on attaining a height where they can look about them, see the admirable shape forced on all the other trees of their family and adopt it without further delay. Weather is so cumbersome, one feels a little comical to be putting up with it still.
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There are moments in the lives of the best of us when we feel uncontrollably accusatory. It is most unfortunate if at such times we happen to be in the company of a modest person. It only makes matters so much more difficult for us. We begin by a mildly disparaging remark concerning the other person, of course, expecting it to be hotly refuted, our having said such a thing attacked, a short lecture read us, and all our accusative inclinations killed in their infancy. We look to our friend for such treatment, and what is our concern when the meek creature fails us and agrees with us in our bad opinion! We are let down with a horrid jolt, feeling equal pain for both, and the only course open to us is to say something twice as strong in the hope that it will spur the object of our criticism into some show of spirit, when we will be rated as we should. Otherwise we will have to do it ourselves. If she still insists that she has always known herself to have just such faults, one is obliged — and uncommonly hot at the obligation one is, too — to reduce oneself to a mere nothing, reconstruct the dismantled character of one’s friend, and, when it has been patted into shape, even slightly ornamented where the piecing showed, it is handed back intact. The restitution is wrung from one by the other person’s utter inability to protect herself. To add that the process has been exhausting is superfluous. You are verbally prostrated.
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There are kindly folk who make an attempt to calculate what those members of their family are doing who happen to be on the other side of the over-indulged Atlantic. They are not content merely to think of them, but must think of them with accuracy. They add the proper number of hours and, after much mental strain, picture them as dining when we lunch, teaing as we go to bed, returning from the opera when we are respectably lying in our beds listening to a companionably striking clock, and, finally, when we are up and about our business, it is shocking to think of those lazy people still slothfully lying abed. It is probably from such calculations as these that mothers have come to think of Paris as so dissipated a place for their student daughters. There does seem something undeniably loose about hours diverging so widely from our own. As those members of our families are always ahead of us, they must live so much faster than we do. We are perpetually behind them and have a belated, left-in-the-rear, staid, and lumbering feeling in consequence. It is depressing, and their refusing to do things at the same time that we do adds to our loneliness.
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