"It seems a long time since the morning mail could be called correspondence"
About this Quote
A whole culture of attention collapses inside Barzun's dry little lament. "The morning mail" is not just a delivery schedule; it's a metronome for a certain kind of civic and intellectual life, when letters arrived as events and demanded you rise to meet them. By pairing that with "could be called correspondence", Barzun needles the reader with a precise, almost pedantic distinction: mail is logistics; correspondence is relationship, reciprocity, the slow back-and-forth that assumes a person on the other end worth addressing in full sentences.
The line works because it refuses nostalgia's warm glow and instead offers a cool diagnostic. "Seems a long time" carries the weary tone of someone who has watched an institution thin out gradually, not vanish overnight. Barzun, an educator steeped in the long arc of ideas, is really talking about the erosion of cultivated exchange: fewer crafted arguments, fewer sustained disagreements, fewer letters that build a mind over time. The subtext is that modern communication (even in his later decades, before social media fully detonated the genre) trades depth for velocity, transactions for continuities.
There's also a sly moral charge embedded in that one word, correspondence. To correspond is to answer, to be accountable, to acknowledge you've been addressed. Barzun isn't pining for fountain pens; he's critiquing a world where messages multiply while genuine reply - the kind that changes both parties - becomes rarer. The sentence is a warning disguised as wit: when communication stops corresponding, society stops listening, and education becomes mere information handling.
The line works because it refuses nostalgia's warm glow and instead offers a cool diagnostic. "Seems a long time" carries the weary tone of someone who has watched an institution thin out gradually, not vanish overnight. Barzun, an educator steeped in the long arc of ideas, is really talking about the erosion of cultivated exchange: fewer crafted arguments, fewer sustained disagreements, fewer letters that build a mind over time. The subtext is that modern communication (even in his later decades, before social media fully detonated the genre) trades depth for velocity, transactions for continuities.
There's also a sly moral charge embedded in that one word, correspondence. To correspond is to answer, to be accountable, to acknowledge you've been addressed. Barzun isn't pining for fountain pens; he's critiquing a world where messages multiply while genuine reply - the kind that changes both parties - becomes rarer. The sentence is a warning disguised as wit: when communication stops corresponding, society stops listening, and education becomes mere information handling.
Quote Details
| Topic | Nostalgia |
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