Humane Arts: Letter Writing

all right ladies and gentlemen welcome thank you for coming out again uh tonight's subject will be letter writing but there'll be sort of a long detour through the history of education to get back to letter writing just so you know so it is the season of the Christmas letter so at this time of year more than any other we're aware that we don't know how to write letters I hope you're great right I mean think it's like the worst genre ever the bad Christmas letter so uh to understand why we write such bad Christmas letters is really the subject of tonight's essay or discussion and hopefully what we can potentially do individually and communally to uh fix it um if it's possible uh I I was torn on what to put on the little handout tonight so I just went with selected passages from letters we don't have time to read all of them but hopefully you will you've got Melville the Hawthorne Cicero to attus uh n to Peter Gast and sa shonagon to this is actually from her journal but many of her journal entries were actually also letters so that one I put down there likely from a letter that might have been a bit of a cheap but it's such a lovely passage um um so what's important to note about this all these people from these disperate places and times and civilizations shockingly enough received essentially the same education this is one of the things that we're going to be spending a lot of time talking about um cuz everyone's aware right that we just we don't write letters anymore email is not letter writing we'll talk about that but people blame email now for the death of the letter this is this is historically inaccurate the letter died long before email was invented email functions differently from letters um but it certainly had nothing to do with a Decline and disappearance of the letter as a serious format um so it's important to keep that in mind most people who think about these things or write about these things put the death of the letter right around 1920 or so and there's good reasons to understand that's probably a correct date few people wrote fine letters after that but generally speaking right around 1920 as a general practice the ...