I liked Vivian Gornick on the difference between talking to someone on the phone and writing a letter:

‘When we talk we each cradle the receiver, stare unseeing into the emptiness of the rooms we occupy, and concentrate on the exchange … The telephone conversation is, by its very nature, reactive not reflective. Immediacy is its prime virtue. The immediacy delivers quick company, instant stimulation; the stimulation is cathartic; catharsis pushes back anxiety; into open space flows the kind of thought generated by electric return. The letter, written in absorbed solitude, is an act of faith; it assumes the presence of humanity; world and self are generated from within; loneliness is courted not feared. To write a letter is to be alone with my thoughts in the conjured presence of another person. I keep myself imaginative company. I occupy the empty room. I alone infuse the silence.’

(From Approaching Eye Level (1997), pp. 152, 162)

Caring about how the words in a sentence slot together can feel like a lonely business. There is an early scene in the film Broadcast News, in which the young Aaron Altman (who grows up to be a brilliant but spiky news reporter, played by Albert Brooks) is being beaten up in high school by the class bullies. As he struggles to his feet, he comes up with what he believes will be a devastating putdown: ‘You’ll never make more than nineteen thousand dollars a year!’ They grab him by the hair and carry on punching him. He tries again, this time with a mouth full of blood: ‘Okay, take this: You’ll never leave South Boston and I’m going to see the whole damn world!’ As they twist his arm round his back and scrape his face against the concrete, he delivers his coup de grace: ‘You’ll never know the pleasure of writing a graceful sentence!’ They punch him in the stomach, he sinks to the ground and they walk away.

I’m looking forward to reading Matthew Kirschenbaum’s Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing (good title), which comes out at the end of May. I wonder if Primo Levi will be in it. In 1984 he wrote to an English friend that he was ‘in danger of becoming a Mac bore’. When she described his Apple as merely a ‘clever new typewriter’, he replied: ‘It’s a lot more than that! It’s a memory prosthesis, an archive, an unprotesting secretary, a new game each day, as well as a designer, as you will see from the enclosed centipede picture.’ (From Ian Thomson’s biography of Levi, p. 456)