Brain Food #713

To see the person, it takes some imagination

Thoughts of the day

It is no secret that I love letters. There is something in the way they are written, slightly confessional, but also more emotional and sometimes less direct than an essay, that in the correspondence of others we find pieces of ourselves, and our own thoughts.

Part of the beauty of letters is that they may sometimes remain unanswered, and that should be acceptable, because their purpose may not always be to receive a response, but to act as a means of self-expression.

On letter-writing, Emily Dickinson wrote, “A letter always seemed to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend.” Beyond living outside the confines of the body, letters also stand outside temporal space. You can write letters to someone in the past, and also in the future.

I recently stumbled upon a project called ‘Future Me’, a website which allows you to visualise your future self and write a letter to them, and choose for it to be delivered at a later point in time. If you are curious, you can also read the letters of others who chose to make them public.

Writing a letter to oneself can be an interesting exercise, one that can help us imagine where we think we will be in an indiscriminate amount of years, and thus reveal our true goals and desires, even if those are not immediately obvious otherwise.

But it can also be a gift to our future selves, a reminder of how far we have come, who we once were, but also of how some of the things we want today may not be so important a few years down the line.

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Cubist Composition - Portrait of a Seated Person Holding a Letter, created by Salvador Dali in 1923. The most prominent part of the painting, and the one with the most clarity, is the letter itself. To see the person, it takes some imagination.

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