Sorry for starting on just an esoteric note, but here it is. Derrida said that writing precedes speech as the primary language mode, and of the face of it, this seems silly. We hear our parents coo at us before we can even imagine what a letter is. But in our world of social media my community of friends consists of more people I know only from writing, whose voices I have never heard, and whose faces I have only gazed at through tiny photos or not at all, whom I know visually only through selected images. And yet, their minds and hearts are as real to me as my next door neighbor’s. No that’s not right. They’re realer. So are Tolstoy’s thoughts, realer. And Dr. Seuss. I have known more humans deeply through their writing than through their voices. Derrida is not longer with us, but if he were, I write to him and tell him he was right.
