In the history of literature, the letter has been a very important element. Epistolary exchange has shed light on the lives of most of the important artists and historical figures — and some less important figures that happened to have written well — in the history of the world.
This light has revealed profound emotional difficulty and expressions of love… savored love, questioned love and destroyed love. Letters often exposed the high comedy of family disputes. The horrors of war were made memorable in letters from the front, while the onerous effects of preposterous government or church intrusion on the sensuous spirit were brought into the open.
The letter, as a form, shed clear light on just about everything.
Now we have had email for quite some time. When I first encountered this phenomenon several years ago, I was heartened. With the rise of the telephone and, much later, the television, good personal writing had abruptly disappeared. It was easier to pick up the phone and call. It was more fulfilling to watch a game show than to write to your lover. So, most people gave up writing letters, and an entire literary genre almost ceased to exist.
But email held out the possibility for a resurgence of the letter-form. The letter is so important to the history of human affairs that its disappearance was like the withering away of a human organ, one that spirits the blood and makes it flow. Email would restore that organ, I hoped.
It has become apparent, though, that email has not risen to the challenge. It does allow for the exchange of fact-based information. So, for that alone, it has some value. But its writers seem uninterested in anything of deeper emotional import.
Letters often hold the heart together. Emails usually have no such thing to grab on to. Letters call for contemplation and soulful enjoyment. Emails? Well…. Letters contain cries for understanding, personal descriptions of terrible events, or recoveries of soul. Emails tap-tap-tap across a depthless surface, asking only that they not be ignored, which they so often are. Letters contain a beginning, a middle, and an end. Emails are wisps containing little, written as quickly as possible.
Maybe it’s a question of mechanics. With letters, you had to dip the quill into the inkwell or, in more modern times, fill the fountain pen with ink. You had to bring out a piece of paper or two. You had to sit down and collect your thoughts, and then be sure that they would come from that quill without a mess…equally so if you were using a fountain pen, most of which, in my childhood recollection, leaked.
Now, with email, you just sit down and start rattling.
Email’s little brother, the tweet, is in our time indeed the perfect email. The failure of Donald Trump’s many efforts on Twitter are an example. An emblem of the end of human thought.
So my wish for the return of real writing has not been fulfilled. This is due to something I had not foreseen, which is that although the usual emailer may want exchange of some kind, an email generally is not really exchange. It almost never cares for good writing. The email is a depthless, short, ungrammatical spill, a random momentary conversations that goes nowhere, or at least not far. Fact is all. Heart means little.
And now, horror of horrors, we have the Twitter novel, which somehow I feel is not destined — at least not yet — to deny Charles Dickens. But it might. We will have seen the end of human transcendence on this planet when a chapter like number 42 in Moby Dick, on the whiteness of the whale, which is surely one of the most lyric and strange pieces of writing in the English language, is replaced by a chapter of 280 characters that have little to do with each other, as is the case with most tweets.
So, for the vast majority of this new language I propose the term “@e-speak.” The word could be an adjective, a kind of descriptive term that refers simply to the natures of the email/Twitter/et. al. themselves. For example, you read a short little tweet, of a few impenetrable words and signs, with no capital letters and no punctuation, something about nothing, written in illiterate language. It rattles with “@e-speak” inconsequence. That’s an adjective.
My use of the term would also make it into a noun. “@e-speak” is the language that, in another context, would be called gibberish.
Elon, it’s going to get way worse. You’d better be ready!
© Copyright 2022. Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.
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