A few days ago, I received a text message with a very simple sentence: “We still have to talk about it.” Staying on the screen so coldly without any emotion, I was stunned at that time. Obviously, it’s a very ordinary sentence, but after reading it, my whole body felt empty.
It is also this inexplicable text message that reminds me of Virginia Evans’ book The Correspondent.
This book tells the story of an old man who relies on letters and emails to communicate with people all year round. He seems to be online all the time and keeps in touch, but in fact, he avoids sincerity with words. His life is filled with information, but he is getting more and more lonely. The more I read the book, the more unpleasant I feel. The more I read, the more I feel that this book is basically about us. This book is very straightforward, directly breaking through all the most hurtful parts of chatting and sending messages.
Surrounded by messages, feeling more and more lonely
The protagonist of The Correspondent is a person who is entangled by news, surrounded by emails and text messages, as if he is chatting with people at any time, but his life is full of all kinds of information, and there is not even a gap.
The author puts the most uncomfortable truth there: the more we talk, the lonelier you are, and the more you contact, the emptier your heart becomes. The book is very realistic. Technology makes finding someone a matter of a second, but people and people’s hearts are getting farther and farther away.
Nowadays, we can contact anyone immediately, but can we really hold the grievances, anxiety, care, and sincerity in our hearts by relying on those cold words? Actually, I don’t believe it at all. The feeling of being surrounded by a bunch of information, but still feeling alone, I know this feeling, and I’m too afraid of it. This kind of intimate connection is gradually grinding the true feelings between people more and more.
The emotional emptiness behind efficient communication
What suffocates me most about this book is that it mercilessly exposes the emptiness of modern communication. The author repeatedly expresses a point of view that I agree with in the book: electronic communication is turning communication into an information transaction without warmth. All emotions, tones, and temperatures have been filtered clean, leaving only dry words. What the protagonist faces every day is such a pile of soulless empty shells, which seems to be busy, but in fact, it is barren.
I keep replying to messages, which looks efficient and fulfilling, but in the middle of the night, I suddenly find that my relationship with the people around me is fading little by little, and even becoming more perfunctory and strange. The desperate trend in the book: people gradually rely on cold words and forget how to speak sincerely. Every time I read it, my scalp tingles. We are gradually losing the ability to communicate, which makes people panic but feel helpless when they think about it.
Return to the original heart: looking for real communication with warmth
The Correspondent did not give me any light comfort from beginning to end, but woke me up with the experience of the protagonist. Its most cruel and clear sentence is that real speech is never about how much you send or how much you reply, but about emotions really colliding together.
The protagonist slowly becomes numb in one message after another, and he can’t even read the sincerity hidden in the words of others. He wrote a lot of emails and text messages to his children, ex-husbands, and friends. He seemed to have nothing to talk about, but in fact, it was all politeness and avoidance. This is not just writing novels, but also scolding us all. We are fast and convenient. We keep sending messages with our fingers, but we have long forgotten that communication is meant to be heartfelt. It is hot, not cold. I am like this. I type so many words in front of the screen every day. What can really poke my heart is always a face-to-face sentence, a look, and a real sit-down chat.
In the end, the protagonist finally figured it out. Finally, he put down the cold communication, reconciled with his family, forgave himself, no longer relied on information to escape from his heart, and lived his life in peace and redemption.
What people really want is not more information at all, but two hearts truly talking to each other.
