Summer Blogging: Life and Letters X
One of the great reading experience with letters is reading a correspondence. What was the back and forth? How did the two personas that emerge in the letters interact? There are famous correspondences such as The Adams-Jefferson Letters; the Complete Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams, a two volume work, or better still, a two volume conversation with history. One on display in our Browsing Collection is Distant Neighbors: The Selected Letters of Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder. Letters long and short (they exchanged post cards as well as epistles), and they include a lot of writing about reading, a lot of writing about work. Berry and Snyder are of course important literary figures in the modern American scene, but their orientation to the life of the mind and simultaneously to life working with one’s hands makes this a very immediate and available book. A perfect book for summer–for a summer divided between the garden and the library.