Lives of Plenty: A Cautionary Tale

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The Morgan Library recently put together an exhibit of Jane Austen’s letters, and though I am typically a disinterested reader when it comes to my authors’ biographies (a failing, I know), I went. I am no Jane-ite, and though evidence abounds that her writings are of the enduring kind, I’ve not ereceted a shrine for her in the literary real estate of my passions. Further, I doubt that there exists within me a germinating “aha!” moment that promises to sway me in favor of such idolatry at some unforeseen point in my reading future. However, I did wonder about what her personal correspondences would sound like – as starchy and formal as the dialogue in her fiction? And then of course there was the thrill of reading correspondence not meant for public consumption – a pleasure not as illicit perhaps as it could be if performed in privacy with the mail of some contemporary living, breathing person, but thrilling nonetheless.

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I went, and found two things to be true; firstly, I found that the glimpses of the sour, judgemental Jane that I had detected in her fiction – specifically, the smallness that she gives some of her characters, coupled with a holier-than-thou-ness and meanness of spirit almost as visible throughout as the ink on the page – was all over her letters. The closer the relationship between her and her correspondent, the more biting her wit, the less sympathetic she seemed to be towards what ultimately were common human failings. But what else, I supposed, was a Victorian woman to do with her time, if she not bitch?

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Secondly, and what was more striking than the brittle personality under my scrutiny, what I found most interesting about her letters was how densely filled they were, and I do mean that in the most physical sense. There was barely any white space left on the page. Margins were utilized to write in, in long lines perpendicular to the rest of the text. In between the lines of the body of her letter, were other lines written in the space between, and up-side down, just so:

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She had also crosshatched her letter (see the image all the way at the top) in what resulted in a chaotic-looking, surprisingly readable, close-to-100-percent utilization of the single sheet of paper, which, folded just so, served also as bearer of address and stamp, so that no envelope was needed to post it.

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The wall texts explained this phenomenon quite simply – paper was expensive, and so letter-writers husbanded their space by necessity.

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I do not pretend that there is anything deliberately noble about these purely fiscal concerns – but I am tickled by the by-products of such circumstances. That expense limited how many trees were cut seems something of a blessing, and even more of one is the fact than an instrument of writing was so highly prized as a direct consequence.

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One of my first few blog posts speaks of this very same phenomenon, as it was an entirely different thing for me to receive an international phone call in the days of their expense and rarity, than it is today when my sister’s voice is but a headset and 35 cents away.

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Which all leads me to wonder about the coefficient of happiness in these times, when most things are cheaply bought, in quantities that supply most needs to excess, and what this surfeit means, what having plenty can ever mean. It seems to me that there are many who go hungry who are overstuffed, many whose appetites, though slaked, continue to grow, to want more, and more alarmingly, to need more. I wonder if we are increasingly morphing into addicts of one form or another, and if our dependencies, defined as they are societally as necessities, have trapped us into lives of unceasing, aching desire. The term “quarter-life crisis”, after all, is a recent one, coined for my generation and others like mine. And I wonder how we can think of our human trajectory as “progress”, when all we seem to be learning is existential despair at an ever-earlier age.

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My mother used to paint me what I saw then as simple, simple-minded, positively parochial childhood pleasures from her own past. In the summer, there were cases of mangoes, ripe, stringy, and just waiting to ambush her with an explosion of juices dripping down her chin, pleasurable punishment for her over-eager bite. There were cases of figs, skin leathery like forbidden flesh, and the inside so sweet and dense it was like eating molasses by the mouthful. In the winter, there were street cart-roasted sweet potatoes, their skins sticky on the inside with sugar caramelized to perfection for what would be the last generation of Egyptian children to grasp how wonderful their little lives would never again be.  Their own children, though having many of the same pleasures, would exhibit the symptoms of discontent at an early age.

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By the time I was her age, my capacity for wonderment had already atrophied, so that I knew, even as I ran through the stalks, that my family's field of sugarcane was not as vast as it appeared to my six-year-old smallness, and that I should be careful, for too much of it would rot my teeth.

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