And Will It Include Forwarded Jokes?

Okay. I'm going to let one of a variety of cats out of the bag. I work in the English Department at Emory University. Now, since my employer is rarely mentioned here and since I have no problem with Emory, the English Department, or my coworkers, or the professors, or the students, I'm not particularly worried about getting dooced. In fact, all-in-all, it's not a bad gig, and I've enjoyed working in an environment that puts the acquisition of knowledge ahead of the acquisition of cash. In short, good job, good people, good institution.

I had to mention it today, though, because, in order to properly discuss that which I have on my mind, I have to refer to one of our professors and a volume he has co-edited. The book is called, The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, Volume IV, (co-edited by Emory's Ron Schuchard, who is, in addition to being a crackerjack editor and scholar, is a truly nice person) and it won a prestigious award presented by the Modern Language Association of America. And reading about this book led me to wonder whether this kind of tome is completely doomed and if it were to survive, how would it have to develop.

Because the thing is that people no longer have the kind of correspondence that Yeats had. The traffic in letters dwindles and the volume of emails, instant messages, and text messages grows. A generation is already growing that will never receive a meaningful letter in the mail and who will never use a pen and paper to sort through themselves and to attempt to explain who they are to another person distant who attempts to do the same thing in return.

For letters work differently than email or any of its electronic brethren. The best letters are part of an exchange, and they form a drawn out and contemplative conversation, often about a wide range of subjects. Emails and IMs and texts tend to be short and direct and tend to lack depth. They are skewed toward screens and moments and shudder and quake under the burdens of complexity and subtlety. People can't even be bothered to type out words like "you" and "for," and the ubiquity of abbreviations and emoticons make a mockery of any pretense to depth.

Part of the praise for the Yeats Letters concerns the way that the letters show Yeats's personal development and the development of his thoughts and intellect. Would a collection of emails have the same force? Would the transcript of a chat session provide the same insight? Would it even be sensible?

It is quite possible that I'm entirely turned around on this thing, but it seems to me that something of interest and value is being lost. And I don't think it can be recovered. These sorts of collections, with their insights and delights, will be extinct, and I think, in a small way, it will be another instance in which the servers will conquer the served.