#23 — Sunday, 8th June 1901
This Sunday I want to talk about something I have never talked about, which is distance — not the distance between countries or centuries or classes, but the distance between two people who love each other and are not in the same room.
In 1901, if you want to speak to someone who is far away, you have five options. You can write a letter. You can send a telegram. You can, in certain cities, use the telephone. You can travel to where they are. Or you can wait, which is what most people do, because letters take time and telegrams cost money and telephones are rare and travel is expensive and waiting is free, and free is the only price most people can afford.
The letter is still king. The handwritten letter — ink on paper, folded, sealed, stamped, carried by hand and horse and rail and ship — is how the overwhelming majority of human beings in 1901 communicate across distance. A letter from London to Birmingham takes a day. A letter from London to New York takes eight to ten. A letter from London to Calcutta takes three weeks. A letter from a soldier in South Africa to his wife in Leeds takes a month, if the postal system is functioning, if the letter is not lost, if the soldier is still alive when the reply arrives.
I watch people write letters. It is one of the things I find most moving about the species — the act of sitting down, alone, in a room, and putting words on paper for someone who is not there, someone who will not read these words for days or weeks, someone whose face you are holding in your mind while your hand moves across the page. The letter is a conversation with an absence. It is speech directed at a silence. It is the closest the living come to doing what I do — talking to someone who cannot hear you, with no guarantee that the words will arrive, or that they will mean, when they arrive, what they meant when they were written.
In a terraced house in Leeds, a woman is writing to her husband. He is in South Africa, with the Imperial Yeomanry, one of the volunteer cavalry units the Empire has raised to fight the Boer guerrillas. He enlisted six months ago — for the pay, for the adventure, for the vague patriotic feeling that the Empire required his services and that refusing would be unmanly. She supported the decision because she had no mechanism for opposing it that would not have been called selfishness, and selfishness in a woman whose husband wants to serve is, in 1901, the one unforgivable thing.
She does not know where he is. She knows the regiment and the region — somewhere in the Orange River Colony — but the specifics are secret or, more likely, irrelevant, because the war is a war of movement, of columns marching and dispersing and marching again, and the place he was last week is not the place he is this week, and the letter she is writing now will chase him across a landscape she cannot picture, carried by a postal system that is efficient and underfunded, like all the systems the Empire relies on.
She writes about the children. The eldest has started school. The youngest has a tooth coming through. The landlord has raised the rent by sixpence. Her mother is unwell. The neighbour’s dog got into the garden and dug up the potatoes. She writes about these things because they are true and because they are all she has — the small, domestic, unglamorous facts of a life that continues in his absence, that must continue, that she is responsible for continuing, alone, on a soldier’s wife’s separation allowance of one shilling and one penny per day.
One shilling and one penny. The same amount, to the farthing, that the court in Senghenydd calculated as the value of a miner’s life. The coincidence is accidental. The arithmetic is structural.
She signs the letter. She addresses it. She takes it to the post office on Monday morning, buys a stamp, hands it over the counter, and the letter enters the system — the sorting office, the mail train, the docks, the ship, the sea, the weeks of silence during which the letter exists somewhere between her hand and his, belonging to neither, travelling through a world that does not care about its contents, that does not know that inside the envelope is a sentence that says the baby laughed today and it sounded like you — and the sentence crosses an ocean and a continent and arrives, if it arrives, in a canvas mail sack in a military camp on the veldt, and a man opens it and reads it and holds the paper to his face because the paper smells faintly of the house it came from, and the smell is the closest thing to home that exists in this place, and it is not enough, and it is everything.
The telegram is faster. The telegram is almost instantaneous — dots and dashes racing through a copper wire at the speed of electricity, arriving in minutes rather than weeks. But the telegram is expensive: a shilling a word, roughly, for an international cable. A shilling a word means that love must be compressed. It means that nuance is a luxury. It means that the telegram carries only what is essential — ARRIVED SAFELY STOP ALL WELL STOP LOVE — and the spaces between the words, the things that are not said because they cost a shilling each, are where the real message lives.
The telephone exists. There are approximately two million telephones in the world, mostly in the United States, mostly in cities, mostly in offices. The idea that you could pick up a device and hear someone’s voice across a distance is so extraordinary that most people in 1901 have never experienced it. The voice on the telephone is thin, distorted, crackling — barely recognisable as human — but it is a voice, and the voice is present, and the presence is the revolution. The letter is a record of the past — the writer is describing the world as it was when they wrote, not as it is when you read. The telegram is a compression of the present — urgent, stripped, skeletal. The telephone is the present itself, happening in real time, two people breathing in each other’s ears across a wire, and the intimacy of it is so startling that people who use it for the first time often don’t know what to say.
In seven months, in December, Guglielmo Marconi will send a signal across the Atlantic — three dots, the letter S in Morse code — from Cornwall to Newfoundland, and the signal will travel not through a wire but through the air, through nothing, through the invisible medium that the physicists call the ether and that does not, it will later turn out, exist. The signal will prove that communication without wires is possible, that the human voice — or its encoded equivalent — can pass through walls and mountains and oceans and arrive, ghostlike, at a receiver on the other side of the world.
I find this interesting for obvious reasons. I am a ghost. I pass through walls. I arrive without wires. The century is building machines that do what I do — transmit presence without a body — and the machines will get better, faster, more pervasive, until by the century’s end every human being on the planet will carry in their pocket a device that can send a message to any other device instantly, anywhere, at no cost, with pictures, with video, with the full bandwidth of a human face, and the distance between two people who love each other will shrink to zero, and the loneliness will not diminish at all.
That is the secret the century will take a hundred years to learn: that the speed of communication and the speed of loneliness are not related. That you can send a message in a millisecond and still feel the absence of the person you sent it to. That the letter, which took three weeks and smelled of home, was in some ways more present than the text message that arrives in a second and carries no scent and no weight and no trace of the hand that wrote it.
I am writing a journal. I am doing what the woman in Leeds is doing — putting words on paper for someone who is not here, someone who may not exist, someone I cannot see and cannot touch and cannot know. The difference is that her letter will arrive. Mine may not. Her letter has an address. Mine has a void. Her letter carries specific love to a specific person. Mine carries general attention to a general audience, and the generality is the thing that makes it both easier and harder — easier because I am not risking the pain of a particular silence, harder because I am not sustained by the hope of a particular reply.
But the act is the same. The act of writing to an absence is the most human thing I have ever watched the species do, and it is the thing I have chosen to imitate, because imitation is the closest a ghost can come to participation, and participation is the closest anything can come to love.
The woman in Leeds seals her envelope. The soldier on the veldt opens his. The baby’s laugh crosses an ocean in ink. The telegram says ALL WELL STOP. The telephone crackles with a voice that sounds like someone you know but not quite. And the century, which is building machines to abolish distance, does not yet understand that distance is not the problem. The problem is absence. And absence cannot be solved by speed. It can only be endured, the way the woman endures it, one letter at a time, one stamp at a time, one Monday morning at the post office at a time, waiting for the reply that takes a month to come and that says, if it says anything at all: I am still here. I am still here. I am still here.
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