Sense & Sensibility

I wish I could write like Jane Austen. Charming, witty, confident, simple, acutely observational, poignant, each word carefully weighed, a treasure effortlessly penned across the page. The art of writing a letter is no longer an estimable act. The ability to capture spoken language and play it out on paper as if one were speaking instead of writing. To allow the reader to actually hear your voice as he or she scanned your words, turning the paper upside down, sideways and backwards because, you see paper was very costly then, so you wrote on every space possible and then when you ran out, you'd write via "cross-hatching," turning the page sideways and writing across the horizontal lines of text at right angles. She wrote over 3,000 letters in her short life in addition to her novels, most of which were published posthumously.

I went to see the exhibit at the Morgan Library on Friday night at 7pm. Classical music filled the great hall as I stepped into the glass-boxed elevator and leaned on its wooden balusters painted with trompe d'oeil bamboo.

I entered the exhibit room, which was already packed. There, carefully framed on the walls, were Jane's letters, "chat pieces" next to each with extensive descriptions.

It's a shame we are so spoiled nowadays. Paper is cheap. Pens are cheap. We don't even write by hand anymore. We take small things for granted. We throw stuff out when it breaks and buy new ones. What's the use in taking pride in communicating by mail when you can get it instantly through texting, email, twitter or cell phone. What's the point in staying in the moment, enjoying a good read and framing life through a small window like the one Jane looked out of when she wrote her novels and letters to her beloved sister Cassandra.

I believe that we have lost our sense of what it means to really live life to the fullest and the sensibility for what is most important. I wish I could express myself as eloquently as she did over two hundred years ago. I can only be extraordinarily grateful that I was transported for a brief hour into her world and lifted up to a higher plane of being by just reading two lines from one of her letters.

(c) 2010