Message from the past
Via Jill's comment links I found Jorunn's webpage where she had linked to a "message from the past" - a letter written in 1902 by the wife of a vicar of a small Norwegian parish to her successor of 2002. It's a touching letter about the life and sorrows of a vicar's wife anno 1902 when the vicar still had to fetch water to the household from a nearby stream and no modern goods were provided. Now the letter has been transcribed and put online so her story can live on. And the wife of the vicar 2002 has promised to continue the tradition and will leave a letter for the vicar's wife (or husband!) anno 2102.
Prestefruens brev (In Norwegian/Danish)

It is interesting when the internet in a case like this is used as to archive and communicate written stories of everyday life, not just of today, but of yesterday. Bringing our attention to pieces of writing who could and would, most likely, not be made available to a larger public, nor reach as dispersed an audience as this, in any other way. However, the letter of the vicar's wife as a piece of literary writing is nothing special in itself, it is as much its rarity, the idea, the "aura" of the letter itself as it is presented to us in pictures, which makes this a special piece of writing. It demonstrates that even small and mundane everyday stories can become special in context. Unfortunately, there are so many everyday stories on the internet now, that we rarely have the opportunity to see and understand them in the context of the complex social reality which informs them. Multiplicity of a phenomena does lead to the loss of aura in the experience of it, I believe. Perhaps Walther Benjamin also predicted the demise of the story in the age of the internet, when he wrote his essay about The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 16:08