Letters
I think I could say that I am a fan of paper-letters. I guess at the digital age, we rarely find people who still use this old method of communicating. I still do from time to time.
I used to write paper letters more often because when I arrived in Belgium years ago, we still did not have internet at home, so I had to wait for almost a month to receive a reply from my friends or my mom from VN. I could recall clearly the feeling every time I came home from school to see a blue red stripes envelop, and on it there was several bamboo picture stamps ;-). I sat down next to the entrance door, tore it out and read my letter several times before dragging my slow, heavy feet, and my home sick heart up to the stairs to my room. I usually replied right away.
Now, my cousine who just joined Canada with my aunt, couldn't experience that. Everytime she chatted with my uncle, so with her, the experience of living far away from home is not the same thing, and of course less home sick, too.
I am reading a book in French (something I rarely do compare to the past), and it is a book of letters ;-) written in beautiful French. Letters from a wife to her husband and her friends. I love the beautiful phrases she described her surrounding, it is so romantic, sad, but at the same time so details and real. The emotion, her feelings are described in a way that you can not only feel her pain but her optimistism. The language she used to write to her husband, although it sounds very polite and distant, but it says all. Most books nowadays are written in such simple languages, easy to understand, sometimes there is even vulgarity, the language just loses its core. And that worths both for English and French.
"Ma chambre est bien chaude. J'ai un petit brin de feu, et les flammes dansent sur les buches sans se decider a les attaquer...Voici un train qui passe. Maintenant tout est de nouveau silencieux, a l'exception de ma montre." Katherine Mansfield
Isn't that beautiful? Now imagine you are listening to Edith Piaf's "La vie en rose" or "Je ne regret de rien" with something old you wrote on papers (diaries, letters...), memory comes back, and well "without memory we have no soul". Yes, I know this is my mid-life crisis ;-)
I used to write paper letters more often because when I arrived in Belgium years ago, we still did not have internet at home, so I had to wait for almost a month to receive a reply from my friends or my mom from VN. I could recall clearly the feeling every time I came home from school to see a blue red stripes envelop, and on it there was several bamboo picture stamps ;-). I sat down next to the entrance door, tore it out and read my letter several times before dragging my slow, heavy feet, and my home sick heart up to the stairs to my room. I usually replied right away.
Now, my cousine who just joined Canada with my aunt, couldn't experience that. Everytime she chatted with my uncle, so with her, the experience of living far away from home is not the same thing, and of course less home sick, too.
I am reading a book in French (something I rarely do compare to the past), and it is a book of letters ;-) written in beautiful French. Letters from a wife to her husband and her friends. I love the beautiful phrases she described her surrounding, it is so romantic, sad, but at the same time so details and real. The emotion, her feelings are described in a way that you can not only feel her pain but her optimistism. The language she used to write to her husband, although it sounds very polite and distant, but it says all. Most books nowadays are written in such simple languages, easy to understand, sometimes there is even vulgarity, the language just loses its core. And that worths both for English and French.
"Ma chambre est bien chaude. J'ai un petit brin de feu, et les flammes dansent sur les buches sans se decider a les attaquer...Voici un train qui passe. Maintenant tout est de nouveau silencieux, a l'exception de ma montre." Katherine Mansfield
Isn't that beautiful? Now imagine you are listening to Edith Piaf's "La vie en rose" or "Je ne regret de rien" with something old you wrote on papers (diaries, letters...), memory comes back, and well "without memory we have no soul". Yes, I know this is my mid-life crisis ;-)
posted by Vagabonder @ 2:09 PM
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