Digital Intimacies
Among the newsletters at the turning of the year (Scenes of Quiet Reading #3)
This is post #3 in a series designed to evoke the delight of absorptive reading. The short sketches began under the Christmas tree and continued after a gathering. This is a bonus post inspired by the flurry of New Year reminiscences and announcements, which I will join tomorrow. But today is for reading, and it feels like this (voiceover recommended):
A conscientious parent does not take the laptop and phone into bed to read the day’s newsletter posts under the comforter before first light —
Does she?
Rules, begone! The kids are away.
It is so quiet I can’t tell if my ears are ringing or I hear the refrigerator whispering chilly rumors to the milk and celery in the next room.
Sitting up, I curl my hand around the phone and tap open a New Year newsletter.
Also another, and another.
I open digital letters as though I’m sticking my thumb into a paper envelope to spill its mysteries. I anticipate enjoyment and read with interest.
I was a person of paper envelopes until just two years ago, when a smartphone became a necessity for work. Now here I am tapping and scrolling by the lamp.
I want to make a stand for books. In the coming year, I will buy them, check them out of the library, read them, draw others back to them, and (dare I say?) make one myself. I will live in a both/and universe, annotating my personal books with a sharp pencil the way I like, and also deepening digital intimacies with fellow writers whose words get right to the bottom of truth and call back up from the well: There is water here! And it’s clean.
I find more hope in all these letters than I could fit in a single book. Scrolling personal essays by phone is a different way to read, also good.
The long winter night serves as my clock. From behind the curtains, I detect no probes of light as yet. This means I have time to open more letters.
There are more voices here than I can count, exuberant, reticent, frisky, bass to treble, all miraculously together, calling: Come in, the water’s fine! The well of truth gets bigger, swelling outward with a primordial seep. It is brilliant Lake Louise, gem of the mountains. It is the steamy Blue Lagoon.
Some other time, I will insist on putting down devices and making flesh-contact with the world I can touch and smell, but on this last morning of the old year, the palm-sized box of metal and glass delivers up living friends and strangers whose words imply hope somewhere, ardent, persistent hope.
I am glad to be reminded of it.
We reach each other any way we can.
How lovely, Tara. I think we can make these choices! I’m considering how to be even more mindful of this in 2024. Digital and paper coexist in this dialogue - as do digital and “real world” friends. 🩵
I'd trade a few virtual letters for an in-person catch-up one of these days, but I wholeheartedly agree that the old paper-based methods were not necessarily better, and that the warmth that comes from the digital gathering place is real.