On letter writing, newness, and coping with resignation
(Full text of the handwritten letter reprinted below)
October 4, 2018
Dear Sarah,
Hello! I am so excited to be writing this letter to you! We’ve been thinking and talking about doing various projects together for a while and now we are kicking one off! I’ve been thinking and wondering about what I would write in this first letter. I feel full of things to say, and the nice thing about writing letters to each other is that there will be more ahead of us! There always is more ahead, at least we’d hope, but our plan of correspondence here puts a very pleasing system in place to ensure that there is more ahead of us. I often find that I get particularly excited about the start of things — the stage at the beginning for brainstorming and speculating and wondering, and the scales are tipped toward pure possibility — and the exciting thing about letters is that each exchange is a thing, a new thing AND a complete thing, with another brand new letter-reading-and-writing activity right around the corner. This first letter is also interesting because we’ve got a bit of a blank slate for how to begin — we’ve talked and written together and back-and-forth a lot, but we haven’t specifically written letters like this, conducted this kind of exchange. Next week I’ll have read your letter of this week when I go to write my next — but this week it is me alone with my ideas, and our past conversations, and my anticipation for the whole thing. It is a very sweet moment in time, something to savor a bit. It is also a special treat to write letters to you, and to receive letters from you, because I don’t know everything you’ll say (perhaps to state the obvious) but I do know that I like the way you think about things, and you surprise me, and you give me new things to think about, and that is one of the greatest delights! I wonder what your first letter will be about? Will it also be about letter writing in a sort of meta way? What will be going through your mind as you write your first letter? I’ll know soon enough!
This is an exciting time for both of us — you are in business school learning new things, meeting new people, trying out new challenges, and I’ve just moved, after eleven years in San Francisco, to Minneapolis. I like new opportunities to mark time, to chart the weeks and months and years, and this letter marks a new year we’re embarking on together. It’s a bit like a new relationship! We’ve talked and written before but this is just a bit different, more formal. Each of our letters is a little like what we’re wearing to a first date! I think I could spin and speculate on this path but for now I will say farewell! The end of this page compels me.
Until next week,
Your friend,
Eva
October 3, 2018
Dear Eva,
What a week to kick this project off! I have not been this emotionally tied up in events far beyond my personal orbit since Trump was elected. After watching the Kavanaugh hearings this past week, it has been such a familiar wave of emotion – rage turns to sadness turns to resignation.
I feel like there is nothing worse than resignation — a feeling that anything I say, feel, or do doesn’t matter. A feeling that I am inconsequential. I think having a feeling of agency about life is essential to human existence. So, what do I do when that feeling is zapped?
I have been trying to think back to how I coped with it after the election. It was a confusing slog, since it overlapped with the time we were dealing with a terminal diagnosis for our sweet pup, Bowery. Writing that makes me cringe every time. American democracy was in crisis, and we were thrown off kilter by a dying dog? I guess it was quite the lesson in what it means to be human. For all the effort we might make to understand the wider world, we are most rocked by the events in our own tiny orbits.
There is probably some sliver of comfort for me to find embedded in that truth somewhere. I guess maybe it is a reminder not to lose sight of the goodness that lies in plain sight, the goodness I am surrounded by in my own home, the goodness I hug every morning. But Jesus, if that goodness is trapped on all sides amid an unjust and heartless world, is it really much comfort?
I say that, but I know it is more complicated than that. The world is not unjust and heartless simply because there is injustice and cruelty in the world. Nor is the opposite true. I genuinely wonder whether grappling with the existence of so much evil and ugliness in the world while also seeing the beauty and goodness out there is the core struggle for all of us. Is the way in which we square those dueling truths what defines who we are?
It makes me think back to an On Being interview that blew me away a few months ago, one I revisit regularly. It was with physicist Frank Wilczek, who spoke about exactly this paradoxical quality of the physical world and of our realities.
MS. TIPPETT: But, almost, to that give-and-take, that seeming conflict — which, in fact, was as much collegial as it was conflicted — you have such an interesting way of talking about complementarity that I feel is evocative in human terms as well as scientific terms. One of the things you say is that “in ordinary reality and ordinary time and space, the opposite of a truth is a falsehood.” But, you say, “Deep propositions have a meaning that goes beyond their surface.” This is so interesting. “You can recognize a deep truth by the feature that its opposite is also a deep truth.”
DR. WILCZEK: [laughs] Yes.
MS. TIPPETT: So one of the conflicts was, is light a particle or wave? And, in fact, it is both.
DR. WILCZEK: It’s both, and...
MS. TIPPETT: It’s both, right.
DR. WILCZEK: ...sometimes it’s useful to think of it one way. Sometimes it’s useful to think of it another way. And both can be informative in different circumstances. But it’s very difficult, in fact, impossible, to apply them both at once.
MS. TIPPETT: To apply them both at the same time.
DR. WILCZEK: And I think that’s the essence of complementarity. You have to view the world in different ways to do it justice, and the different ways can each be very rich, can each be internally consistent, can each have its own language and rules, but they may be mutually incompatible, and to do full justice to reality, you have to take both of them into account.
MS. TIPPETT: Somewhere you say, “Complementarity is both a feature of physical reality and a lesson in wisdom.” I think what you just said about reality is equally true of — and I know you have to be careful to do too much of this stretching these things — but it’s equally true of the human condition.
DR. WILCZEK: Oh, very much so. [laughs] Oh, I think so. When people ask me what my religion is, I say I’m a complementarian.
Have I finally found my religion?
Your friend,
Sarah