On answering letters late

A reader wrote to me in March. I answered in July. A short apology that turned, halfway through, into a defence of the slow reply.

By Ilse Marrow · 2 minutes · Read it on the web

A reader wrote to me in March about the ferry essay. She had grown up on the far shore and remembered the horn differently: two short blasts, she said, not one long one, and only in fog. It was a careful, generous letter, three pages, the kind that takes an evening to write. I answered it last week. It is July.

I want to apologise to her here, in public, because she deserved a faster reply. I also want to say why I am not sure she deserved a quicker one.

The speed of the thing

Most messages now arrive asking to be answered in the time it took to send them. A letter like hers asks for something else. It was written slowly, on purpose, and its slowness was part of what it said: I have thought about this, and I would like you to think about it too. An answer written on the same evening would have been polite. It would also have been a kind of refusal, a way of closing the matter rather than taking it up.

So I took it up. I went back to the ferry. I asked the deckhand about fog signals, and he looked at me as if I had asked whether boats float, and then told me, at length, that she was right.¹ I asked two of the old swimmers, who disagreed with each other and with her. I read the harbour regulations, which settle nothing and are very long. By the time I wrote back I had a better answer than the one I would have sent in March, and three new questions to put at the end of it.

A small rule

I do not want to make a virtue of my own disorder. Some letters need answering at once, and I have failed those too. But I have started to keep one rule, borrowed from a friend who keeps a bookshop: answer a quick message quickly and a slow letter slowly, and never the other way round.

The reply, she wrote back, arrived on the morning of the first warm day of the year. She said it was worth the wait. I suspect she was being kind. I am keeping the letter anyway.