Letter Writing

This morning I read my favorite book again, and it woke me up.

It helped me understand why, all summer long, I have struggled to write letters.  I sit down at the table, and everything interesting comes up short.  I've felt boring and obvious and blase.  In letters, everything is interesting if it's 'parts to whole' thinking, as opposed to 'whole to parts'.  It was the grandiose thinking at every turn that was stopping me in my tracks.

It all came to me while reading because my favorite book is The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.  The main character has gumption and imagination, and is good at writing letters.  Letters and telegrams structure the book,  and it's a myriad of people who connect back and forth across the English Channel in 1946, just after the war. Everyone is mending, and stories of the German Occupation are revealed through different people and letter styles.  I recommend this book to everyone.



 The teachers at our school had required reading over the summer, and that book clearly described this structure in Classical education. That's where I'm getting this 'whole to parts' and 'parts to whole' descriptions.

When teaching elementary school you tell them one small thing, and they get big picture later.  You're leading them to it.  'Parts to whole' works! 

But not in my middle school brain.  You ask why first, and go from there.  I am always starting with eras, movements, themes, and lifetimes. You can of course discuss Washington's military strategy in the French and Indian War, but will that tell the students anything if they don't know why the war had begun? Or why Washington was sent into pivotal battles at all?  The big picture is always a beginning when I tell the stories of older things and preceding people.

I remembered this morning that letter writing is introverted and opposite from the kind of life I'm used to expressing.  I'm not dressed up and standing in front of students with big ideas when I'm writing letters.  It's private and sentimental and 'parts to whole' at its core.  Therefore, the pen flows when the smallest story can be highlighted.  It is such a relief to come to this discovery.  I was really missing being able to write a good letter.

Here is one of the nicest examples of 'parts to whole' thinking from this book.

18th April, 1946

Dear Dawsey,

I am so glad you want to talk about Charles Lamb on paper.  I have always thought Mary's sorrow made Charles into a great writer - even if he had to give up poetry and clerk for the East India Company because of it.  He had a genius for sympathy that not one of his great friends could touch.  When Wordsworth chided him for not caring enough about nature, Charles wrote, 'I have no passion for groves and valleys.  The rooms where I was born, the furniture which has been before my eyes all my life, a book case whieh has followed me about like a faithful dog wherever I have moved - old chairs, old streets, squres where I have sunned myself, my old school - have I not enough , without your Mountains?  I do not envy you.  I should pity you, did I not know, that the Mind will make friends of any thing.'  A Mind that can make friends of any thing - I thought of that often during the war. 

By chance, I came upon another story of him today.  He often drank too much, far too much, but he was not a sullen drunk.  Once, his host's butler had to carry him home, slung over his shoulder in a fireman's hold.  The next day Charles wrote his host such a hilarious note of apology, the man bequeathed it to his son in his will.  I hope Charles wrote the butler too.

Have you noticed that when your mind is awakened or drawn to someone new, that person's name suddenly pops up everywhere you go?  My friend Sophie calls it coincidence, and Mr. Simpless, my parson friend, calls it Grace.  He thinks that if one cares deeply about someone or something new one throws a kind of energy out into the world, and 'fruitfulness' is drawn in.

Yours ever,
Juliet

I chose this letter because the last paragaph is one of the most interesting paragraphs in the entire book.  I've also found this to be very true.

Earlier in the summer, I found this video, and it brought the sentimental parts of letter writing to the present day.  I like that this method is out there, but I'm just going with the regular pen and paper myself.