RE: Letter no. 115
Dear Chloe,
JD Salinger’s character Holden Caulfield once expressed an appetite for stories that deviate from their destined middles and ends. He espoused that more interesting tales undoubtedly surface halfway through the telling of a story, and he was whimsically inclined to follow these new tangents; should they usurp the story originally to be told, he said, then so be it.
It was this thought that meandered around my mind after having read your letter. I had decided to walk the couple of miles home from the Naval College and was, like Holden, capriciously choosing streets to walk down. Seeing a girl (whom I initially thought to be you, but now doubt) and a gentleman with dreadlocked hair clustered around a red post box, it reminded me of a letter I had to send. Inquisitiveness led me to the other side, whereupon it became my turn to inspect this gift.
The interstices of life are opportunities not to be squandered. How splendid those chance encounters or conversations that arise from straying away from routine, or indeed from our single-mindedness in sticking to these ways. Gerald Burrill once said: ‘The difference between a rut and a grave is the depth’, and I think it is easy to overlook how the slightest nuance in daily life can snowball into a marvellous shift in mentality from drudgery to pleasure.
Of course, being the timid human that I am, and like Alice (of Wonderland fame), I am very fond of giving useful advice, but seldom follow it myself. I have always been a passive person: lurking on the sidelines until goaded into action by taunt or truth.
Reading your letter made me smile: writing it seemed so logical. It also felt like something I might have done, were I not quite so lazy in my meeting of strangers. It is to be applauded. We fill our lives with people and events and sometimes hopefully ideas, yet somewhere along the line we restrict our vision of what to expect from events, or that openness can’t be offered to strangers. Uneasiness in social situations leads to the modern-day gunslinger reaching for a phone: a weapon singular in its ability to draw a person’s attention down away from others’ faces. Idle minutes at bus stops are disdainfully regarded as wasted, instead of being embraced as an event at which we all share a commonality.
Thankfully there’s still a side of life where people write letters to strangers; it is on this side that I would like to stay.
Kindest regards
