Perhaps We are in Eden Still » Blog Archive » A Somewhat Field Trip Post…

Perhaps We are in Eden Still » Blog Archive » A Somewhat Field Trip Post…

After seeing Whitman’s letters in D.C., the whole preservation idea was really the thing that struck me the most. It is interesting that in a world where we have the ability to mass-produce literature and art and have technology that assimilates information almost everywhere so that we may literally and figuratively reach out to the most people, we run the risk of being unfeeling and empty. Whitman extends so far beyond himself even to the point that a group of undergrads a century later would get butterflies simply looking at his handwriting. To this end, in the world of the digital age I wonder just how far our generation will go. Seeing the loops of Whitman’s lettering and studying the places he crossed out words to replace them with others meant more to me than a lot of the other things we saw (perhaps that’s the editor in me?) and you just can’t get that on a computer screen. If we only had access to Whitman’s email account, we wouldn’t have known that he thought about writing “Material Science” before he decided on “Positive Science” (shown in the first image) or be able to wonder why he changed that phrase. We wouldn’t see the intimacy in the words as they were written, the care with which he crafted messages to his mother or the attention he gave to each revision process. The idea that we won’t have that in a hundred years is very distressing to me. I remember a year or so ago I found a letter my grandfather wrote to my grandmother during the war. Since that time, my grandmother has passed away and my grandfather has become very ill, but their love will live on through that letter and I am able to experience it again and again every time I look at it. That is something I wish for everyone, that love live on through letters or journals or even scribbled thoughts on paper napkins and that it be given the ability to touch people across time and place, but in a fast-paced instant-gratification society that feels that sitting down to write a letter would be an inconvenience when a quick email would be a more efficient way to communicate, it seems that this is almost impossible.