But there's something in the air, for three books this autumn are devoted to this trio letter intertwined subjects: A sense of loss suffuses all these works Sansom's book makes it plain with his subtitle, "an elegy".
But perhaps these dying art of letter writing essay, this feeling, essay spark a revival in the writing essay of the fountain pen and the wielding of the Basildon Bond. Perhaps it's like pastoral: Passion can be proportionate to scarcity.
Maybe we are ready to fall back in love with what O'Connell's book calls "slow communication".
Here is a full declaration of interest: O'Connell and I were at school together. We've known each other for 27 years.
Last week I received a letter from him. On beautiful paper, but in Biro he apologised, his daughter, he thought, might have appropriated the fountain pen. It was a wonderful letter: This morning, I started reading his book. It begins by movingly describing a letter he received dying art of letter writing essay a friend when his mother died last year.
I read this with dying art of letter writing essay guilty shock.
I hadn't written to John then. Dying art what point in my apparently well-brought-up letter writing did I suddenly think it was OK not to write dying art of letter writing essay a bereaved friend? It wasn't always like this. Depending on what manner of hoarder O'Connell is, he might well turn up some Higgins juvenalia tucked away writing essay a drawer somewhere.
I'm pretty sure that if I rootled around in my bureau — where the letters-from-friends archive dries up in aboutaround the time that email took off — I'd find letters from him, in his distinctive and elegant hand, the Ys rendered with looped dying art, as you'd write a Dying art of letter writing essay gamma.
Philip Hensher, essay his introduction to The Missing Article source, recalls realising he had no idea what the handwriting of a good friend, whom he'd known a decade, looked like.
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