in honor of letters

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Today is the 75th anniversary of the day, 1946, when jean sent his questions to martin which resulted in the letter on humanism, some weeks later (the same period in which martin was preparing “What are poets for?”).

I recall this like an encounter between friends because humanism is at home informally. Also, I’ve wanted to write relative to martin’s letter as part of developing my sense of “person-al” humanism, which understands our humanity (“being” sacredly “human”) relative to being a person fully. I hope to do that before the middle of December.

I lament techumanity’s waning of letters, slow writing. I wrote by lovely fountain pen, decades ago.

I wrote a long thing yesterday (not by pen), but prudently decided not to send it
to you. But here’s its ending:

...love after seizing the day, happiness after love, and life—dear artistry working for “us,” like real poetic intimacy shared because its emergence from solitude was always to be shared, to belong together through the same text.

Philosophical scholars don’t do close reading often, it seems. Yet, literary reading is at home there, especially with poems. Philosophical reading can learn a lot by taking to heart the care for reading that literary work loves.

How literary work loves: Deconstruction’s self-undermining texts can bloom
into new ways of conceiving (the enabling truth of poetic thinking); creativity beyond imagination (i.e., beyond imagistic conceiving); conceiving beyond meta-structuralism (i.e., beyond ontological longing mirrored in transcending contexts); loving a story’s end as potential to be more, to begin again where being just is becoming—without anxiety toward death, without regret for one’s era of life let be (being let go), loving to move on thankfully.