First things first, I want to finish it. Secondly, it makes me think of ENDER'S GAME, specifically, Ender himself at the end of the novel, when he's carrying the ball of knowledge, going about the universe, and walking up and down upon it. Being a speaker for the dead. What, then, about speaking TO the dead?
There exists a certain amount of relative safety in writing a letter to a non-living entity: they cannot directly (we hope) refute your words. But what if they could? What would they say? That's getting off topic. What I really want to talk about, is why write a letter to the dead at all?
Those kinds of communications are, by default, one-way, as far as writing is concerned. When one writes a letter, there is absolutely NO implication that one will mail the letter. This is different than writing an email: emails were the pre-cursors to instant messages, they were the origin of modern high-speed communication, because delivery is nearly instant.
A letter is an email, but an email is NOT a letter; a square is a rectangle, but a rectangle is not a square.
There's a certain urgency, or lack thereof, in a letter that is/is not present in an email. When one writes a letter, there is the implicit knowledge (in this day and age) that a response, will take time to arrive, if it ever does, if it (the response) was ever written. With an email, however, there exists the general notion that, though a response is not required, if it (the response) is to occur, it will in the immediate future (also, unless one is junkmailed, or mailer-demon-ed, there is the implicit knowledge that the email was received). Such is the nature of the beast, and the beast, is modern communication and interaction.
Time, really, is the issue. Being participatory in a modern context/the modern world means that everything is acquired NOW. Not in twenty minutes, right-fucking-now; if it takes five, that's too long—you're fired. We get things done faster now.
Writing a letter to a non-living entity is hard (easy) enough, but to continue on the modern train, how do you write an email to the dead? This, is a problem of construction.
