Monday 31 August 2020

Who will write our story?

 I am currently reading SHADOWS ON MY HEART, the Civil War diary of Lucy Rebecca Buck of Virginia. It starts Christmas 1861 when the war was almost a year old. Lucy is 18, lives at Bel Air, an estate which has eight slaves (although she does not mention them in her diaries). There are 13 children in the family. Lucy educates the younger ones at home, her two eldest brothers go off to fight for the Southern states. Lucy is not a particularly gifted diarist but she does give us an idea of life at that time. 

Several things struck me as I started to read this book. In our current culture of hardly ever writing letters, how will anyone know how we lived 200 years from now? Yes, we have podcasts and blogs and Instagram and FaceBook, but do they give an intimate view of how we lived and felt in the year 2020? In another 200 years will we be able to reproduce podcasts, etc.?  Technology is changing - I don't say advancing because quite frankly a lot of the tweaks and updates are unnecessary in my opinion - so that we can have no idea how social media, books, phones, etc are going to operate. It bears thinking about.

I recently read somewhere that there is a current debate about prescribing reading lists for some literature courses and there is talk of not making it mandatory to read novels. Novels tell us as much about the current way we live as almost anything else and are far more entertaining than dry history records. One of the things I enjoy about Jane Austen's works, for example, is the glimpse it gives of how Jane and her contemporaries lived and thought. I also enjoy her use of expressions the meanings of which have changed over the years "nice" and "repulsive" being two of my favourites. No more Shakespeare? When I was at school we did As You Like It and for the final exam, Hamlet. In the interim we read Julius Caesar. I can't say I have ever felt that this was a waste of time. 

Letter writing is a dying if not a dead art. There is nothing more entertaining than getting a long letter from a friend or family member filling us in on what they have been doing. They were a life blood when I lived abroad.  At school we read some of the best essays (some of which I found boring, Ruskin, for example, and Edmund Burke except for his description of Marie Antoinette) but some of which are relevant to this day. Lord Chesterfield's advice to his son springs to mind, also Robert Louis Stevenson's cheerful style and Charles Lamb, especially on his two ages of man : those who borrow and those who lend. What a wealth of beautiful English phrases lies in these anthologies. 

I won't go in to poetry, although I loved it at school and still read some favourite poems over and over. Want to know which ones? Well, there is the mysterious The Listeners by Walter de la Mare with the "silence surged softly backwards when the plunging hooves were gone". Beautiful. And Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost. But I won't bore you - just have a look at the writings of both these poets some time.

Even the humble full stop has been attacked and the idea circulated that we don't need it when we write. Grammar has always been a sticky subject. Where do you put the comma? What's a semi-colon for, anyway? It's not that hard. You put a comma where you'd pause for breath or emphasis and you stick a full stop where you want to finish that sentence. Why worry about it? In my opinion, (note the comma) people are intelligent and know what they want to say, lack of practice makes them shy of writing it sometimes and this shouldn't happen.

We have already lost a great deal by our reliance on smartphones and laptops and all things electronic. I know that my writing and spelling has suffered simply because the computer can do it all so much quicker and easier. But let's keep reading books, book in paperback and hardback, books to keep on your bookshelf, by your bed, on the coffee table: but books to be read, to be picked up and glanced through or snuggled up with. Books, simply.


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