A good conversation — in letters

 My friend Melvyn and I have been exchanging letters for a while (“The Pleasures of old-fashioned letters,” Nov. 18, 2021). It looks like the habit has stuck.

I’d recommend it, and here’s why:

I find myself, during the week, coming across an idea that, ordinarily, I’d let escape. But rather than letting the idea float off, I wonder what my good friend would say. And the act of putting the idea down on paper helps me get clearer about the idea itself and about the questions I want to ask.

Ralph Waldo Emerson put it this way:

Our intellectual and active powers increase with our affection. The scholar sits down to write, and all his years of meditation do not furnish him with one good thought or happy expression; but it is necessary to write a letter to a friend, — and, forthwith, troops of gentle thoughts invest themselves, on every hand, with chosen words.

Montaigne, bless him, thought that conversation was an essential part of our learning. He was all for “knocking off the corners by rubbing our brains against other people’s.”

Conversations are hard to beat. Some occur in writing, rather than over lunch. 

I'm grateful for Dr. Melvyn Schreiber's wisdom and his ability to share it. I'm thinking of him on his birthday. 

• Sources: Emerson’s note is from his essay on “Friendship.” Montaigne’s comment is from “Educating Children,” Book I, Essay 26.