writing matters (3)

I return to it ever so often, because herein lies its imperative, its pleasure, its despair, its endless beauty.

Finding the right words.

To whomever, I will keep on writing thus. Even if at the risk of being misunderstood, distorted, smeared. (As you invariably are.)

Does it matter, anyhow?

Because it is always to a past or to a future friend that you write.

Never here, he or she has already left -- or is as yet to arrive.


My beloved absent.

*       *       *

Nowadays people only write letters to record requests, transactions, and detailed explanations, or to send brief greetings. When they want to make personal contact, they telephone. Conversation by telephone communicates with the tone and warmth of the human voice, but what moved one deeply can only be shared through language when one has found the right words. Finding the right words takes time, and the one to whom they are addressed is no longer the one you thought  he or she was when you wrote. One sends one's letters to an address he or she has left.

--Alphonso Lingis, Abuses (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. vii.