This here column, a once-noble experiment, was founded in May, 2002, on two conceits: the first, that personal missives, in an intimate voice, could be written to a general public with unknown tastes and characteristics—perhaps thereby refuting, or confirming, the principle that to write well you must "know your audience." The experiment was to discover whether an audience would materialize, yet remain forever unknown, or whether one would gradually identify itself, building real intimacy over an immense electrical chasm.

In short, to test the fact that, while nobody knows you're a dog on the Internet, neither do you know who it is that's reading your doggy exclamations.

To the author's immense gratification, a tiny but meaningful audience did materialize, accreting like raindrops around trivial particles of dust.

Now, more than nine years on, this mouthpiece has long outlived its usefulness. A series of major life shifts rendered its author confused and unfocused. And the voice strained with age.

The second conceit arose from the observation that poetry's "you" means either God or the beloved, and that these two could be mixed together into an ever-unknown motivating force. And well, this conceit became utterly falsified. The mystery of the beloved gave way to lucid dullness as adolescent yearning gave way to adult responsibility and determination. And the cheeky agnosticism, which allowed for auras in magical nature, eventually surrendered to rationalist skepticism.

So the present blog is no longer a source of inspiration and energy, nor a communication channel to an interesting, interested audience—and solely because of its own rhetorical collapse. So rather than press it on like an obsoleted milkman, I prefer to refit it as a museum of its former self, acknowledging the progress we have made into a new world without losing the past.

Letters’ tireless editors are now at work curating past posts, condensing the nine-year column down into a representative sample of the most worthy posts.

Starting this week, the regular posts and presentation of the blog will disappear, and we'll start the retrospective: each month, roughly, we'll republish a year's worth of curated posts, with an eye toward remembering and appreciating the best of what this column has produced.

The author remains energetic, and will be found elsewhere. But Letters to an Unknown Audience is done, its voice quenched. Do not pray only but be vigilant and set your hand to the work.

I think of how You wanted the world to be beautiful, but thought it would be too hard.

It's essentially a remake of the moldy old program Upstairs, Downstairs, which Americans will know either through its presentation on PBS under the auspices of Masterpiece Theatre, or else through its presentation on Sesame Street under the auspices of Monsterpiece Theatre. But the new show takes a strong injection of life from the modern arts of television: strong acting, hotly-paced writing and good production values, all of which lead to a tighter contest of values. It ran in 7 episodes on ITV in Britain last Fall and is available now in the States (get the "uncut UK version"!) from your favorite purveyor of digital moving images.

The first five minutes are a tour de force of cinematic exposition and the rest of the series, although it lives in a handful of interiors, still makes careful use of the medium to tell its story; those interiors are lush and pleasant to stare at, but the distinction between the noble family of the house (that'd be the Crawleys of Downton) and the servants (a fine ensemble that bustles around below decks, all engaged in and proud of their work) is palpable & nerve-racking.

One of the intriguing themes is the relative power that some of the household staff seem to have; the aristocrats almost suffer under their own noblesse oblige: they are compelled to take care of their staff, and give them each their full role in the house. A touching scene in the second or third episode has a nouveau aristocrat, formerly a "country" lawyer (hailing from Manchester), putting out his valet by insisting on dressing himself. The newer world this lawyer represents, one made of middle-classes and an idea of social equality, leaves no place for the undereducated man who so proudly stands at his side in a tuxedo far more crisp and ornamented than you or I have ever worn.

Echoes of Remains of the Day are hard to ignore. That book, and Anthony Hopkins' portrayal of the hero, gives great insight into the possible psychology—peculiar to modern eyes—of a great man of service, a butler.

Also intriguing are the ways the nobles use the servants in their gossip, and vice-versa, each perhaps tacitly aware that the other side must be sharing their secrets. Lady Grantham speaks freely with her ladies' maid, and her confidences are repeated selectively downstairs; meanwhile the Lady bends to persuasion from her maid, whose own ideas were shaken up by the other servants.

Unlike a fervent Communist's caricature of such a scene, the nobles are not perennial oppressors, hobbling their servants in every way. Instead, the show gives degrees of dignity to the men and women of the staff, in what was after all a human institution, molded in human softness. It renders its politics in subtler tones, showing how a housemaid, while dignified, might be trapped in this one role for life, despite all her talents—perhaps unable to meet a lover or make a family.

It is a fascinating clockwork, such a house, with its in-built tensions and simultaneously the pervasive sense of propriety, and of order, which assuages the nerves of all, allows them their sense of civility over the barbarians elsewhere, and yet wedges each person, lord and footman alike, into a narrowly determined role. Downton Abbey is a sweet, salty, and worthy realization of such a clockwork.

I thought of this while listening to Carissa's Wierd: its moroseness is calming, though there's a strong energy churning in it.

Wifi was put in everywhere and the future lived up to our dreams, modulo jetpacks. We were comfortable and privileged. The only new kind of challenge was a baby challenge. Life with babies will prove more difficult than imagined, and soon there will be a new generation coming up to turn us over.

"Thank goodness you found us," Natalia Dmitriyevna Solzhenitsyn said, in Russian. "I thought you got lost."

"I did, a little."

"Well, it happens all the time."

"The birches here look Russian," I said.

"But they aren't, really," she said. "The birches here are fat, even a little gnarled. In Russia, they are tall and thin and straight."

That's David Remnick, talking to Natalia Solzhenitsyn, whose husband, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, was a dramatically brave dissident against the Soviet Union and who was living at the time in Vermont. Quoted in Remnick's article "The Exile: Solzhenitsyn in Vermont," republished in his Reporting.

In May 1960, Ernest phoned me from Cuba. He was uncharacteristically perturbed that the unfinished Life article had reached 92,453 words. The contract was for 40,000; he was having nightmares.

A month later he called again. He had cut only 530 words, he was exhausted and would it be an imposition to ask me to come to Cuba to help him?

I did, and over the next nine days I submitted list upon list of suggested cuts. At first he rejected them: “What I’ve written is Proustian in its cumulative effect, and if we eliminate detail we destroy that effect.”

Of course a 90,000-word Life magazine article on bullfighting must be too long, must be dreary in the end. But maybe that Proustian effect was real; maybe he should have made a skeleton magazine article and a much longer book—who knows.

But the story here is the aging writer's attachment to his own affectations, his unwillingness to be light and let a story flow. Think how effortless are those sketches in A Moveable Feast!

The Times article also holds a compelling testimony on an artist's loss of vital appetite for life, when we no longer writes. A final act of artistry would be to discover a way to age gracefully, to fade away without burning out. But Hemingway did not accomplish this.

You are mistaken, sure, when you say they do not know him: unlearned men have a wonderful penetration in these matters—have you ever known a village reputation to be wrong? It is a penetration that seems to dissipate, with a little education, somewhat as the ability to remember poetry will go. I have known peasants who could recite two or three thousand verses. But would you indeed say our discipline is relaxd? It surprises me, but then I know so little of naval things."

Again from Master and Commander.

"How very glad I am to see you," cried Jack, as Stephen groped his way aboard ... Come and breakfast directly—I have held it back on purpose. How do you find yourself? Tolerably spry, I hope? Tolerably spry?"

"I am very well, I thank you," said Stephen, who indeed looked somewhat less cadaverous, flushed as he was with pleasure at the open friendliness of his welcome. "I will take a look at my sick-bay and then I will share your bacon with the utmost pleasure. ..."

And then, after a moment's break:

"That," he said, a little greasy from bacon, "that was a point that exercised my mind a good deal during your absence. Would my loblolly boy pay the men back in their own coin? Would they return to their persecution of him? How quickly could he come by a new identity?"

"Identity? said Jack, comfortably pouring out more coffee. "Is not identity something you are born with?"

"The identity I am thinking of is something that hovers between a man and the rest of the world: a mid-point between his view of himself and their of him—for each, of course, affects the other continually. ..."

I am sharing this with you.

"My God, it is prime to be at sea again. Don't you feel like a badger in a barrel, on shore?"

"A badger in a barrel?" said Stephen, thinking of badgers he had known. "I do not."

That's Patrick O'Brien, in Master and Commander, a really rather good book.

It was 1967, and the world was in the middle of some sort of secular millenarian convusion. Young people thought everything would change in some Rapture-like way.

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