There was one thing that no one at the institute wanted to miss: the arrival of the morning post. Letters from parents and friends were always welcome, but it was correspondence from far-flung colleagues and the journals that were seized upon for the latest breaking news from the frontiers of physics.
From QUANTUM by Manjit Kumar. In the above, he’s writing about the 1920s. Times long gone. Out here on the Thames Delta, we don’t even get the physical post in the morning any more. In the 1970s and 1980s, we had first post in the morning and second post in the afternoon. I remember having to wait in for second post when an expected letter (or an unemployment Giro) didn’t arrive in the first post.
Now we send email and texts that are rarely much longer than a telegram, and they get peppered across the full 24-hour spectrum. I like that. Imagine telling someone in 1924 that all their post and telegrams will be sent instantly to a piece of glass you keep in your pocket, powered by electrickery and radio (and costing the same as a house in London in 1924)? I am happy with this and look forward to the future.
That said: the pang I got when I read that paragraph the other night was real. The book is littered with extracts from long letters sent between peers in the emergent field of quantum physics, the last hurrah of the Republic Of Letters. The pang wasn’t necessarily nostalgia. I have never trusted nostalgia. Desiderium, maybe? But certainly also that I’m as bad as anyone else at writing letters. I remember long letters from and to peers, and I got out of the habit of writing them when email properly kicked in.
And the journals thing. I remember the rush and joy of the new magazines related to my work and interests arriving, when I was young (and I suspect that’s the defining thing here – both my youth and the slowness of information): a new Comics Journal, for example, a publication I owe a great deal to. I have, of late, been unsubscribing from newsletters. Not entirely of my own volition – I had a weird glitch with Substack and had to delete my account there, which meant losing a dozen newsletters. I’m in the process of adding those into my RSS feed instead. But the newsier stuff is getting dropped. It all tends to be a bit flat and a bit samey.
Some newsletters are good because they’re long letters from friends or peers, some are good because they bring knowledge and ideas like journals. But there aren’t enough of them, for me. I wonder today where I should be looking. I wonder if this is even a thing worth yearning for (yearning may be too strong a word, but clearly it’s been bugging me). But it’s an interesting thing to think about, for me.
(I also do a weekly newsletter, which is currently on pause til July 7 because of work and etc.)
Vaguely related, maybe: years and years ago, we used to have conversations about the social letterbox, part of which conversation turned into the Little Printer, which I still think was a brave thing. I distrust the social-network aspects of things like Substack. My letters do not need a public web-end comments section. Email should perhaps have been our social letterbox. Probably it once was. Maybe it can be again: I can spend a day hitting it with a couple of tools and end up with the sense that, when an email app does ping at me, there’s a better than fifty-percent chance that it’s something I want to read or need. And it will ping less. And most of the time I’ll be able to wait until I have the space to write a long reply, rather than just triage and tie something off fast.
Jotter notes are not fully baked.
Connected:
