The Lost Art of Letter-writing

 

 

In an age that demands instant gratification, emails have replaced letters, and more is the pity. In letters we used to go into depths; now we skim the surface of things in order to finish and move on quickly.

If we want to include details, we attach a picture or even a video. We communicate by email and replies to questions are generally brief. Compared to letters, emails are little more than an exchange of notes.

For the most part, letter writing has fallen by the wayside, and with it grammar: no more capitalisation of words - you know, those capital letters that make all the difference between helping your Uncle Jack off a horse and helping your uncle jack off a horse - and no more punctuation either which turns everyone into a psycho - e.g. "I like cooking my family and my pets" - or may cost you $13 million, see here.

Letter writing is an art which takes time. You sit down with a blank sheet of paper and pour out your thoughts. There is a sense of gravitas to it, a deliberate act of communicating with someone else whom you can almost image to be talking to as you write. You choose not just your words deliberately, but also your writing-paper, even your writing tool. I still treasure my Montblanc fountain pen - remember fountain pens? there was a time when a man was judged by the fountain pen he kept - with which I carried on many years of correspondence with some of the most important persons in my life.

Unfortunately, I didn't keep their letters. I always thought there would be more but there are only emails - and who wants to keep an email?

 

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Here's Daniel Greenfield for some interesting reading

 

 

Daniel Greenfield is an investigative journalist. Here's something to whet your appetite: "Forget the Syrian Civil War for a moment. Even without the Sunnis and Shiites competing to give each other machete haircuts every sunny morning, there would still be a permanent Muslim refugee crisis.

The vast majority of civil wars over the last ten years have taken place in Muslim countries. Muslim countries are also some of the poorest in the world. And Muslim countries also have high birth rates.

Combine violence and poverty with a population boom and you get a permanent migration crisis.

No matter what happens in Syria or Libya next year, that permanent migration crisis isn’t going away.

The Muslim world is expanding unsustainably. In the Middle East and Asia, Muslims tend to underperform their non-Muslim neighbors both educationally and economically. Oil is the only asset that gave Muslims any advantage and in the age of fracking, its value is a lot shakier than it used to be.

The Muslim world had lost its old role as the intermediary between Asia and the West. And it has no economic function in the new world except to blackmail it by spreading violence and instability.

Muslim countries with lower literacy rates, especially for women, are never going to be economic winners at any trade that doesn’t come gushing out of the ground. Nor will unstable dictatorships ever be able to provide social mobility or access to the good life. At best they’ll hand out subsidies for bread.

The Muslim world has no prospects for getting any better. The Arab Spring was a Western delusion. Growing populations divided along tribal and religious lines are competing for a limited amount of land, power and wealth. Countries without a future are set to double in size.

There are only two solutions; war or migration.

Either you fight and take what you want at home. Or you go abroad and take what you want there.

Let’s assume that the Iraq War had never happened. How would a religiously and ethnically divided Iraq have managed its growth from 13 million in the eighties to 30 million around the Iraq War to 76 million in 2050?

The answer is a bloody civil war followed by genocide, ethnic cleansing and migration.

What’s happening now would have happened anyway. It was already happening under Saddam Hussein.

Baghdad has one of the highest population densities in the world. And it has no future. The same is true across the region. The only real economic plan anyone here has is to get money from the West.

Plan A for getting money out of the West is creating a crisis that will force it to intervene. That can mean anything from starting a war to aiding terrorists that threaten the West. Muslim countries keep shooting themselves in the foot so that Westerners will rush over to kiss the booboo and make it better.

Plan B is to move to Europe.

And Plan B is a great plan. It’s the only real economic plan that works. At least until the West runs out of native and naïve Westerners who foot the bill for all the migrants, refugees and outright settlers.

For thousands of dollars, a Middle Eastern Muslim can pay to be smuggled into Europe. It’s a small investment with a big payoff. Even the lowest tier welfare benefits in Sweden are higher than the average salary in a typical Muslim migrant nation. And Muslim migrants are extremely attuned to the payoffs. It’s why they clamor to go to Germany or Sweden, not Greece or Slovakia. And it’s why they insist on big cities with an existing Muslim social welfare infrastructure, not some rural village.

A Muslim migrant is an investment for an entire extended family. Once the young men get their papers, family reunification begins. That doesn’t just mean every extended family member showing up and demanding their benefits. It also means that the family members will be selling access to Europe to anyone who can afford it. Don’t hike or raft your way to Europe. Mohammed or Ahmed will claim that you’re a family member. Or temporarily marry you so you can bring your whole extended family along.

Mohammed gets paid. So does Mo’s extended family which brokers these transactions. Human trafficking doesn’t just involve rafts. It’s about having the right family connections.

And all that is just the tip of a very big business iceberg.

Where do Muslim migrants come up with a smuggling fee that amounts to several years of salary for an average worker? Some come from wealthy families. Others are sponsored by crime networks and family groups that are out to move everything from drugs to weapons to large numbers of people into Europe.

Large loans will be repaid as the new migrants begin sending their new welfare benefits back home. Many will be officially unemployed even while unofficially making money through everything from slave labor to organized crime. European authorities will blame their failure to participate in the job market on racism rather than acknowledging that they exist within the confines of an alternate economy.

It’s not only individuals or families who can pursue Plan B. Turkey wants to join the European Union. It’s one solution for an Islamist populist economy built on piles of debt. The EU has a choice between dealing with the stream of migrants from Turkey moving to Europe. Or all of Turkey moving into Europe.

The West didn’t create this problem. Its interventions, however misguided, attempted to manage it.

Islamic violence is not a response to Western colonialism. Not only does it predate it, but as many foreign policy experts are so fond of pointing out, its greatest number of casualties are Muslims. The West did not create Muslim dysfunction. And it is not responsible for it. Instead the dysfunction of the Muslim world keeps dragging the West in. Every Western attempt to ameliorate it, from humanitarian aid to peacekeeping operations, only opens up the West to take the blame for Islamic dysfunction.

The permanent refugee crisis is a structural problem caused by the conditions of the Muslim world.

The West can’t solve the crisis at its source. Only Muslims can do that. And there are no easy answers. But the West can and should avoid being dragged down into the black hole of Muslim dysfunction.

Even Germany’s Merkel learned that the number of refugees is not a finite quantity that can be relieved with a charitable gesture. It’s the same escalating number of people that will show up if you start throwing bags of money out of an open window. And it’s a number that no country can absorb.

Muslim civil wars will continue even if the West never intervenes in them because their part of the world is fundamentally unstable. These conflicts will lead to the displacement of millions of people. But even without violence, economic opportunism alone will drive millions to the West. And those millions carry with them the dysfunction of their culture that will make them a burden and a threat.

If Muslims can’t reconcile their conflicts at home, what makes us think that they will reconcile them in Europe? Instead of resolving their problems through migration, they only export them to new shores. The same outbursts of Islamic violence, xenophobia, economic malaise and unsustainable growth follow them across seas and oceans, across continents and countries. Distance is no answer. Travel is no cure. Solving Syria will solve nothing. The Muslim world is full of fault lines. It’s growing and it’s running out of room to grow. We can’t save Muslims from themselves. We can only save ourselves from their violence.

The permanent Muslim refugee crisis will never stop being our crisis unless we close the door."

 

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Those were testing times

 

The dictation text as read out to me from a newspaper cutting of the day

 

On the 17th of May 1971 I sat for a dictation test before the Justice of the Peace in Kieta on the island of Bougainville. The successful completion of this test was one of the many requirements before being granted Australian citizenship.

 

Dictation Test for Naturalization; Applicant Manfred P Goerman; Date May 17, 1971

 

I am led to believe that this is no longer a requirement. Indeed, your eligibility may even increase if you are totally illiterate, not just in English but even in your own native language, and if you hail from a country so benighted that your chances of ever becoming a productive member of our modern society are less than zero.

And so, instead of providing you with an adequate standard of living in your own country through our foreign aid program, we will be happy to empty on you a cornucopia of all the wonders of modern living which are even beyond the means of many of our own citizens.

And should your lifelong dependency on our welfare state compel you to rape and pillage, there are numerous government-funded agencies to guide you through your various traumas and persecution complexes.

Even if your anti-social and indeed criminal behaviour continues and the Immigration Department decides to deport you, we will pay your legal fees to fight us all the way to the High Court until the end of your days.

If you hire some clever lawyers with whom to share the booty, you may even be able to claim a compensation pay-out for wrongful treatment.

How times have changed! It makes growing old easier, knowing that we won't be here to reap the bitter harvest, don't you think?

 

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I've returned to the real world

 

 

It's the kind of overcast afternoon which is best spent alone. I made myself a thermos of hot tea, grabbed a box of cookies, and walked the two hundred metres to "Melbourne", to spend the rest of the day in quiet contemplation and some peaceful reading.

Padma is quite happy to binge-watch some action-packed TV drama on iView which is full of "Mord and Todschlag". Funny how they never tell you their movie preferences until after the wedding cake is cut!

"Melbourne" — or "BONNIEDOON"; I even thought of calling it my own "Shangri-La" — is unheated, but even on an overcast day it feels cosy. Remember those kerosene heaters from the 60s? We used to smuggle them into our unheated boarding-house rooms to survive the cold Canberra winters despite their ever-present fire danger and risk of carbon monoxide poisoning. They are still on sale, and I played with the idea of getting one for "Melbourne". For me the danger wouldn't be carbon monoxide poisoning but the possibility that I would be getting so comfortable there that I wouldn't want to go back to the main house.

 

At $259, it's an inexpensive alternative to voluntary assisted dying - click here

 

Instead of lighting a kerosene heater, I just light a kerosene lantern. Its gentle flame gives the illusion of warmth while the smell of kerosene takes me back to another time and place when life was much simpler.

 

 

"Melbourne" is my own little world and my escape from the world. If I had my time over again — how often have I heard people say that! — I would build myself in a matter of just a few days two or three little "Melbournes": one to live in, another to sleep in, and a third fitted out as a kitchen and bathroom. I would connect all three with a covered walkway, and to hell with living in a conventional house. The nearest I ever came to this was when I befriended a German couple in the 70s who lived a self-sufficient lifestyle just outside Mackay - see here.

I have been dipping in and out of Robert Dessaix's book "(and so forth)", which is as unconventional as its title suggests, but kerosene lamps, as cosy as they are, don't make good reading lights, and I may switch over to ABC Radio National to continue to stimulate my never-idle mind.

The tea is keeping me warm, as is the beanie on my head and the fluffy "Puschen" on my feet. The cooler weather means that the only noise from the river is the occasional splash of a surfacing fish, and with all this peace and quiet around me and the smell of kerosene in my nostrils I feel a bit like Tom Neale. If you have never heard of him, then you must be a newcomer to this blog because I wrote of him and his book "An Island to Oneself" more times than I can remember - click here.

I always keep a copy of his book inside "Melbourne", and so maybe I will read it (again!) after I have finished with Robert Dessaix. Then, with the tea and cookies gone and the kerosene lantern spluttering its last, I shall return, ever so reluctantly, to the main house and the real world.

 

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Literary allusions and lost opportunities

 

James Hilton's book "Lost Horizon" was turned into a movie twice - and not very successfully at that; after all, an earthly paradise is best left to one's imagination - however, the radio plays are much better: click here or here or here. So where is that legendary Shangri-La we still yearn for to this day? For a possible answer, click here.

 

Looking back over my peripatetic working life, I just wished I had been a more widely-read person at that time which would've enabled me to gain a greater insight into the many people I met and the many places I visited.

When I lived in Greece in the early 80s I visited Hydra several times without ever knowing anything about George Johnston who with his wife Charmian Clift lived for some eight years on the island. George Johnston is of course best known for his book "My Brother Jack" and I have read every one of his (and her) many other books since.

When I worked in Port Moresby, one of the old accountants in my office was a Mr Chipps, and the whole office would chortle "Goodbye, Mr. Chips", every time he left the office without my ever realising that they were making a literary reference to James Hilton's famous book.

And of course the same James Hilton wrote "Lost Horizon" in which he gave us the word "Shangri-La". Indeed, the Shangri-La hotel chain bought the rights to his book and placed a copy on every bedside table in place of the usual Gideon Bible. I knew nothing of this when I stayed at various Shangri-La Hotels in Malaysia and Singapore and I had barely heard of Hermann Hesse when I stayed in the suite named after him in the Raffles Hotel in Singapore.

While working in Western Samoa, I visited Pago Pago without ever having read Somerset Maugham's short story "Rain", and I lived and worked in Rangoon before I had ever heard of Rudyard Kipling's "On the Road to Mandalay". Even Saudi Arabia would've held greater fascination for me had I had the time to read Lawrence's "Seven Pillars of Wisdom".

How much richer my travels would've been had I done all that reading earlier but of course as it was, I found just enough time to read the necessary technical literature to allow me to carry out my work. In those hectic days it was an almost unheard-of luxury to find the time to read a novel. Instead, I read 'The Practice of Modern Internal Auditing', 'Petroleum Accounting: Principles, Procedures & Issues' and 'Ship Operations and Management', studied accountancy standards or IATA rule books, improved my laytime calculation skills, compared charter parties and worked my way through case studies in forensic auditing.

To this day I am still fascinated by books about unaccountable accounting or the world's worst maritime frauds. BUT I have also found time to dip into John Donne's "No Man is an Island" and Boethius's "The Consolation of Philosophy", so things are beginning to balance out.

 

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