My recent allowance is 40¢. This I used for areoplanes and other playthings of childhood but now I am a scout and I put away my childish things. Before I would spend 20¢ of my ¢.40 allowance and in five minutes I would have empty pockets and nothing to gain and 20¢ to lose. When I a a scout I have to buy canteens, haversacks, blankets, searchlidgs, poncho things that will last for years and I can always use it while I can’t use a cholcalote marshmellow sunday with vanilla ice cream and so I put in my plea for a raise of thirty cents for me to buy scout things and pay my own way more around.
2 August 1959
smut-to-go:
Yesterday I sold a pair of peacocks, the first time I have sold any. These people showed up in a long white car, the woman in short shorts. They obviously had plenty of money that they weren’t used to. She flew a Piper Cub, kept two coons, and what she called a “Weimeraw” dog. He was going to start in on pheasants, peafowl and bullfrogs. They came in and admired the house and she said, “We was in Macon looking for some French provincial furniture. I want me a love seat.” The man was a structural engineer. He said he had a friend who was a writer in Mississippi and I said who was that. He said, “His name is Bill Faulkner. I don’t know if he’s any good or not but he’s a mighty nice fellow.” I told him he was right good.
- Flannery O’Connor in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop
“I told him he was right good.”
I love Flannery O’Connor.
I am now going to ask you a favor which sounds quite crazy, and which I should regard as such, were I the one to receive the letter. It is also the very greatest test that even the kindest person could be put to. Well, this is it:
Write to me only once a week, so that your letter arrives on Sunday — for I cannot endure your daily letters, I am incapable of enduring them. For instance, I answer one of your letters, then lie in bed in apparent calm, but my heart beats through my entire body and is conscious only of you. I belong to you; there is really no other way of expressing it, and that is not strong enough. But for this very reason I don’t want to know what you are wearing; it confuses me so much that I cannot deal with life; and that’s why I don’t want to know that you are fond of me.
I really like to write letters. I have a notebook solely for letter-writing, and I only use certain writing utensils. I like putting my thoughts and words and feelings onto a page for someone; sometimes carefully and intentionally, sometimes quickly and rambling. I get a different sense when writing a letter then when I write something for mass consumption or for myself.
I think that letters are more intimate than conversation. I’ll talk to darned-near anyone if I have to. I say word after insincere word to strangers all evening at work, and often at school as well, and I feel like my spoken words lose their potency and value. They’re commonplace. Humdrum. Diluted. I share them indiscriminately.
I don’t write a letter to just anyone. My written words are, I think, reserved for the people in my life that I care about the most. I differentiate, here, between written and typed word. Typing is a weird, mechanical process for me. Writing is an artful, conscious act. Then there’s the tangible aspect of a letter—spoken words sublimate into nothing once they reach the air.
We can feel their effect, but we can never hold those words. They are word-ghosts. If I mail you a letter, you can see me and touch me. You can read and reread my heart on the page; my written words grant me a sort of half-presence even in my absence. Years from now, if you’ve kept the things I’ve written for you, you’ll still have a piece of me crystallized at age 23.
Letters are intentional. I can hold a conversation without any effort or purpose, but I can’t accidentally drive to the post office at two in the afternoon and spend forty-four cents in dimes, nickels and pennies from the change in my car’s armrest to purchase a stamp to mail the letter that I did not just accidentally write.
I’d love to receive letters in the mail. How exciting is it to see someone’s familiar handwriting on an envelope? To see how they write my name? To know that, when I open up that envelope, there’s a piece of that person waiting to reveal itself to me?
