The Epistles:

Prior to the second century BCE, a particular Roman citizen took up quill & ink, and in a series of letters, devoted copious thought and meditation to the subject of the divine. Able to mull on these ideas for pages and pages at a time, with nought but himself to censor from - the singular act of addressing these notions and distributing them made that citizen largely responsible for spreading Christianity across the Roman Empire, and informed much of Martin Luther’s “Faith” over “Works” doctrine, and the Reformation.

The citizen in question was Paul (the Apostle [also Saint]), author of what has become one of the (if not the) most important correspondence of the following 21 centuries.

Now, while faith is not our main concern, the central conceit of this blog is to explore the grey areas between fiction and reality - and at least a nod to metaphysical conversations is par for the course.

Letters are a well-honored tradition of writing. No one can deny the delight of finding (mixed-in with the garbage and bills that pass for mail these days) an envelope addressed to them, and a note or letter carefully prepared for the eyes of the recipient. It is a multi-sensory experience: at once mental, given the concepts or content discussed in the document, and tactile in its inherent physicality.

Unfortunately, we’ve lost about half of that experience in the move to digital communication, but collections of letters still make for good reading.

Collated collections of correspondences are also curious things. In literature, the entire epistolary genre is composed of works-presumed to be conversational in nature, and often presented as (ostensibly factual) strings of letters. Pride and Prejudice is sort of a loose example, though Frankenstein and the original Dracula do so more concretely. (It should be noted, inclusion of ancillary documents not necessarily letters is also considered epistolary: bankers notes, interview transcripts, theater ticket stubs, etc.)

Nick Bantok's Griffin & Sabine is of particular note. The book (series) is typically filed under the "Art Books and Books About Art" category because each page is an original, individual post-card, plucked from a specific alternate universe for the reader's consumption. On one side is a post-card's oilette, and on the reverse - its handwritten contents. The exchanged cards slowly reveal the connection between the two writers, and as things get more and more complicated, the book itself complexifies - soon offering whole envelopes crammed with the written mail of these two characters.

Now, there's sort of a sick vicarious-ness to all this, (in a similar vein to PostSecret - the "real-life" anonymous secret revealing repository,) but I would argue that the verisimilitude of these collections is often more true than some non-fiction novel of similar topic.

Where this figures into modern-day literature is of some interest to me. With tools like email and Twitter, much of the art inherent to written dialog has been clipped, and in many cases, lost. Perhaps it is the Luddite in me, (perhaps it is my sick devotion to the study of words and their use), but I don’t think that we’ve fully explored the potentials of the postal system.