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
-- the elegant passage on tea-drinking I read in Lin Yutang's 1935 My Country and My People, my mountain-biking in the soft hills of South Island, New Zealand, yongtaufoo meals in an Ang Mo Kio kopitiam that cost only 40 cents for each fat chunk, a chance encounter with a Danish girl with gold-tanned slender legs at Beach Road,
-- conversation amidst aromatic muffins and latte in a green sanctuary, an epigram that I crafted on the spur of the moment that "You can know how much your life counts by counting the number of friends willing to turn up at your funeral", what I heard Vinton Cerf, father of the Internet, said about personal robots, memory chips in wine bottles, exoskeletons and other marvels of the near future,
-- what I saw at Changi Point when the sun flamed the sea in its reluctance to set, and my insistence to Sharon Tian that books for her teenage son and his friends to read should include Things Fall Apart by Chinua Acebe and The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff, although I suspect hotblooded teens are only interested in magazines with pictures of naked women.
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. The pleasure, too, I want to share with the world. The recorded moments are my letters to myself, and since they are on the World Wide Web, are also my 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 read by only 1.5 readers -- the author themselves and half a friend.
Even Emily Dickinson's poems were ignored in her lifetime.
