Letter to the world
This is my letter to the World
That never wrote to Me –
The simple News that Nature told –
With tender Majesty
Emily Dickinson’s poem holds true today for bloggers and anyone who publishes their thoughts and ideas online.
I have so much to tell the world
– an elegant passage on tea-drinking in Lin Yutang's 1935 My Country and My People, my mountain-biking on the soft hills of South Island, New Zealand, savoury currypuff snacks in an Ang Mo Kio kopitiam, a chance encounter with a Danish girl with gold-tanned slender legs
– conversation with congenial friends in a green sanctuary, an epigram that flashed on me out of the blue: “You can know how much your life counts by counting the friends turning up at your funeral”
– what I saw across Changi Point when the sun flamed the sea in its reluctance to set, what I insisted that a friend's teenage son should read: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff, although I suspect hotblooded teens are more interested in seeing pictures of naked female bodies on the Web.
For me, such remembrances seem to be worth recording in a blog or in an online diary, so that I can read back months or years later, for personal pleasure. This pleasure, too, I want to share with the world. So I recorded them, as letters to myself, and letters to the world.
But who am I kidding?
Nobody reads other people's blogs and online journals unless the contents have inflammatory material, saucy gossips and celebrity ranting.
So far, only a handful of people have responded to the stuff I have posted on the Web. My consolation is that almost all other blogs in the wide world are also read by a handful of people, in fact only 1.5 people – the author themselves and half a friend.
Even Emily Dickinson's poems were ignored in her lifetime.
