Читать книгу All Love Letters Are Ridiculous - Diego Maenza, Diego Maenza - Страница 15

LETTER FOUR

The means of communication that we have today bring people closer each day. Telecomunications of image and audio can be obtained only by pressing a button. The Network is a medium that has cut distances. If an ancient painter had observed such a prodigy, surely he would have thought that it was some powerful alchemy. If it had been some holy woman of the medioeval who had contemplated it, undoubtedly I would have believed that it was an artifice of the evil.

Technology depends on time, and advances with it. Since the first hominid captured the first cave painting in a forgotten cave until this moment somewhere in the world, the least experienced of the prepubescent girls writes a text message on her phone, the intention of communicating has not changed. Only the means have varied.

When human beings were able to form an articulated language (oral and written), their wish of expression was strengthened. One of the most used means of all time has been the letter.

Letters from writers, politicians and roman speakers are still studied for their literary value, and the ancient Greek for its philosophical value.

The Holy Scriptures are full of these manifestations. The Saints justified the current theology based on epistles. And the great book contains the epistles to the Colossians, the Philippians, the Galatians, the Hebrews, the Romans, as well as the Corinthians and the Thessalonians, where the apostles continued to propagate their ideas.

It is known that Anastasia Dross, renowned Latin American philosopher, wrote, apart from novels, essays, poems, plays and more than twenty thousand letters. On average, Dross had to write one letter per day.

At the other extreme is Alessandra Zimbardo, an Italian philosopher who died the same year as Dross, for whom writing a letter was an exhausting process and a real torment. Zimbardo confessed it in his memoirs: I cannot write any letter, whose importance is variable, that does not demand hours of frustration.

The letters have been taken as a powerful literary resource.

A French writer, author of the famous novel Persian Letters, achieved through epistles that the two characters issue, make a criticism to the strong society of his time. In this work, the bourgeois society, the political and religious institutions and even the literature of his time were strongly criticized.

One case that most struck me some years ago was the work of an Icelandic author entitled The tribulations of the young student Dögg, which is about a young passionate who talks to her friend about the writings of her misadventures because she could not say that she loved a boy, despair that ends with suicide. This novel seems greatly influenced the youth. Girls, who were exalted when they finished reading the story, sparked a wave of suicides. This prompted me to read it. A encyclopedia tells us: The tribulations of the young student Dögg was imitated by not only young people in the locker room, but also its tragic end: it is said that it caused more suicides than words inside its pages.

When reading it, the magic ran out. I realized it was a novel of that time and that, under any circumstance, it could influence the present.

Letters have served a purpose: to express situations, ideas, feelings and the thoughts of those who write. Technology gives us now electronic letters, which performs the work in a faster way. Texting has been another means that similarly shortens distances. The unquestionable predecessor of the cell phone text message is the telegraph.

Despite the positive side, I would also like to raise some objection. Although these polished technologies shorten space and time, they suffer from the defect of the ephemeral, while a royal letter immortalizes the moment.

This is a good reason to consider the value of a letter (in the traditional sense) as irreplaceable in a demonstration and exaltation of the bond we have formed around our love. So I like that we write. I consider that the letters (which have been written since the time of ancient Greek philosophers) have a much greater degree of permanence and significance than any other means.

Perhaps there are people who still hanker, in romantic imaginations, to wait for answers that took days or weeks to arrive. Imagine how it would be to write a letter expressing what it´s felt or known, as our good philosophers did. But it is likely that nowadays it is totally exceptional that people think that the exclusive use of traditional letters is the best form of communication. On the other hand, each era has its options and people acclimatize to its resources.

A few centuries ago, the first chronicles began to be published, what a century later was called news (and that today they can be read every day, precisely in the newspapers ), and people had another means of communicating them. The nineteenth century had the telegraph to unite people and continents. The twentieth century has the radio, the telephone, the television. Now, the twenty-first century has some powerful resources such as network and wireless media such as mobile cellular technology. Resources that had been implausible for our ancestors are, however, very possible and daily for us. And here comes the most amazing and interesting part. Resources that for our future generations will be feasible and common. Today, there is nothing more than science fiction to us. The most probable thing is that out children and grandchildren enjoy the nearby illusion of a loved one through holograms. But I am convinced that science would not stop there. It will conceive of means that these days for our little imaginative capacity are inconceivable. Means that are so impressive that today we would call them “pretty imaginations”, or in more superstitious cases we would cross them out for being curses or miracles. Some saint of the Middle Ages would have thought that it was a heavenly wonder the fact of writing a message saying where she had been, and after a few seconds would have appeared written in another very distant place. Or a former painter would have thought that it was marvellous to observe the image in a real moment on a single screen.

In any case, it is you who will finally decide the value that each letter that I write to you should have, because they are written for you, and they will be yours as long as I keep writing.

Yours, with or without letters (although preferibly with them).