I'm continuing to enjoy Thomas Wolfe's Letters. They hearken back to an epistolary age that is lost, when the letter had all the potential to be an essay, a short story, a travelogue, a memoir. Our emails will never be the same. Here are just a couple of snippets Wolfe wrote from Europe in 1928. Consider, for example, this prescient observation about the coming dynamics of globalization:
"The things you and I have liked best in Europe--the grand pictures, the buildings, and so on--belong mostly to an order of things that has gone: the world--the world that has to eat and drink and labor--is probably being 'Americanized.' At least, they groan about it, and deprecate it, but I think they earnestly want it for themselves. To be 'Americanized' is simply to be industrialized in the most complete and serviceable fashion."
Or this culmination of his description of a church service in rural Hungary, sort of oozing with a weird blend of the sacramental and excremental which, oddly, makes sense:
"Nowhere have I ever seen the simple animal nature of men so plainly as in this church--I kep thinking of this as they all stood there with their smell of the stable, hearing of their kinship to God."
