The two most recent pieces of snail mail that I received were: - A letter from leer10; we're keeping up our Hubski pen pal correspondence. I really look forward to receiving and reading his letters. There's something extraordinarily pleasant about reading what someone has taken the time to actually write about their life, their hobbies, and their ideas. Not to mention establishing a personal connection through a medium so rarely used these days. - A copy of G-Strings and Sympathy: Strip Club Regulars and Male Desire by Katherine Frank, an anthropologist. I have yet to start reading it, as I'm just under halfway through Tolstoy's War and Peace (with Stephen King's The Dark Tower Volume II on hold in the background). Well said! The aforementioned War and Peace is a physical copy I got at a car boot sale for €1; I downloaded the copy of The Dark Tower Volume II to my laptop from Library Genesis. I think it's telling that I put the latter on hold and started reading the former.The upside of actual tangible artifacts is that they have a presence. Their tangibility means that I will pick them up, carry them, hold them. They will find their way to me more randomly. I don't have to consciously seek them out. The postcards can be put up on the wall or fridge, the books will find their way to a shelf where others will be exposed to them.
Tactility is underrated, and I'm very afraid of losing it at the expense of convenience and expediency. I didn't care one scrap about moving away from CD's in favor of digital files, but I think that's because in the end, the music, the real endpoint, is the same in an experiential sense (putting aside arguments over sound quality of compressed files for a moment). However, there seems to be a quality to holding a book and turning pages that is lost with eBooks. I wouldn't try to articulate why I love books so much, but I'm just not ready to get a Kindle yet. I even love looking at books on my shelf. I recently moved, and I finally decided to give away a bunch of books that I haven't picked up off the shelf in a decade. Even though I probably wouldn't have ever read any of them again, I know I'll miss them sometimes, and FWIW I'm not typically a very sentimental person when it comes to objects. That is, I don't fetishize things, but I'll cry when books are a thing reserved for collectors.I think it's telling that I put the latter on hold and started reading the former.
Our relation to tangible items requires more contemplation. On the one hand you have the unforgettable scenes of mountains of garbage in WALL-E. On the other hand you have Shelley's poem Ozymandias. While ostensibly it's about the folly and arrogance of ambitious all-powerful emperors, it also suggests that the art we build will outlast us. So questions like, What tangible items, if any, should we carry with us through life? What do we lose when we let go of things? What do we gain? have occupied my thoughts for some time.