Abstract
Everyday aesthetics offers a way to disclose the complexity of a seemingly routine activity like doing the dishes. In this article, I consider the aesthetic allure of one 15-year-old’s letters home from camp preserved in a university’s archives. By returning aesthetics to experience, philosophical hermeneutics restores the experience of understanding to its multi-sensuous materialization. When things speak to us and we in turn respond to them, we are both transformed. Betty Kaufman’s letters vividly depict her experiences at the Laurel Falls Camp for Girls. How, I wondered, does aesthetics perform its mode of being? What are its topological contours? What might qualitative researchers co-responding with archival materials gain from this form of entanglement with understanding?
Betty’s Letters: Describing the Archival Object Itself
I carefully open the flap to the hard stock box labeled “Betty Kaufman Camp Laurel Falls papers.” Neatly packaged are 38 9½ × 14½-inch standard archival folders. After scanning the contents of the first two folders, I open folder 1:3 and describe the objects I find there.
Three sheets of paper are nestled in the oversized manila folder I just retrieved from a box handed to me in the reading room of the University of Georgia’s Special Collections Library. Alongside the sheets of paper is an envelope with the postmark August 12, 1943. There are also three wrinkled scraps that look like torn one-ply rough toilet paper with thick black or blue markings on them suggestive of crayon. The markings, “SUCH MATURITY,” “WHEE” (with a drawing of an eye), and “CHEESIT—BUSS-EYE” are unintelligible until their presence is explained on one of the sheets of paper that accompanies them. Each sheet of paper lying next to these fragments is covered with markings on both sides except for the last side of the third sheet. Each sheet measures 7½ by 10½ inches and the three pages are folded in three, so as to fit into the envelope which measures 4 × 7½ inches. The paper itself has a good weight, is thicker than the average note paper, but thinner than card stock. It has a smooth feel on one side and a very finely ridged feel on the other. The color is best described as off-white as it lacks the yellowish hue that is conveyed in the color “cream.” The envelope has a purple and white 3-cents U.S. postage stamp, with the image of Thomas Jefferson on it. An indentation of the circle made by the postmark providing the date and location of Clayton, GA, can be found on the side, lacking notation of the third sheet of paper. Turning my attention now to the markings themselves, I note that they are made with black ink and are identifiable as connected script symbols from the Latin alphabet and form words that are recognizable as English. The height of each letter is approximately ⅛ inch for lower case and ¼ inch for upper case. The writing remains fairly consistent in size and creates evenly spaced horizontal lines that slope slightly downward when read from left to right. The paper itself is blank so the “lines” are formed by the script itself. The writing is clear and without smudging, except for three letters in the first two lines, which suggest some contact with liquid and a series of seven ink blots on page 3, forming a slightly curved line of dots moving from the middle of the page to the right edge of the top third of the page increasing in size, suggesting a movement of the writing utensil from left to right. Whatever made the marks can leak. Besides these breaks in the script, the script presents itself evenly and without, it seems, much pausing. When a correction is made to a word, the incorrect word is crossed out with a straight line tilting down from left to right and the correct word is then written next to it. Only two such corrections are noted. Some words are underlined and punctuation varies between periods, commas, question marks, and exclamation marks. The three pages are folded together providing an indication that they belong together. The fold also provides direction as to which page is intended to come first as the opening up of the fold places a particular page in the front. In addition, besides alphabetical script, each page has a natural number noted on the top right corner and set apart by a parenthesis. The numbers follow a sequence from 1 to 5, indicating the order of the pages. Page 1 also has Thursday written next to the number. The first line of the text reads as “Dear mums,” and the next two lines “Oh, I could nearly die laughing! We have had the funniest day.” The words continue and provide an account of happenings, including information learned about differences between boys and girls during a psychology class, inquiries about the correct train to take home, some kind of commotion involving the “Buss Eye’s Triplets,” preparation for the triplets’ visit, the disorder caused by the triplets’ visit, including notes scattered around the cabin “that’s what those things I’m sending are,” and finally the last three lines: “Gotta go, now,” “triplets of kisses,” and “Betty” marking the end of the script. Taken together, these clues provide direction for how the text is to be read. There is also an indication of a beginning and ending, suggesting that the three pages of paper together form a whole and that no parts of this object are missing. The opening line “Dear Mums,” and the closing line “Betty” point to familiarity between these individuals conveyed as a familial relationship. The unfolding account provided by the writer who is assumed to be Betty due to the location of this name as a signature indicates a purposefulness to putting the account on paper; a purposefulness that is conveyed as a sharing with the individual identified as “mums.” In addition, the regularity and flawlessness of the scripting suggests an activity familiar to Betty. The layout and numbering of the pages, the opening and closing lines also suggest knowledge of, and experience with, this form of accounting. On page 1, there is a sketch of a stick figure with a triangle around the middle and a stick figure without a triangle implying that one is a girl and the other a boy. To support this observation, the words “nya-nya!
I found Betty’s letters in the Betty Kaufman Camp Laurel Falls papers collection in the Hargrett Library archives at the University of Georgia in Georgia, United States. This is a collection of letters Betty wrote to her parents while attending the Laurel Falls Camp for Girls in Clayton, Georgia during the summers of 1943, 1944, and 1945. An obituary in the Chicago Tribune on September 16, 2018, lists Betty’s birthday as November 30, 1927, which would have made her 15 in August 1943.
As a historical object, handwritten letters open different connections between “the here and now of the writer and the here and now of the reader” (Barton & Hall, 2000, p. 6). David Barton and Nigel Hall (2000) suggest that when “analysing letter writing as a social practice it is useful to distinguish the texts, the participants, the activities and the artefacts” (p. 6). In most studies, more than one foci is usually present but these distinctions can help researchers and readers clearly articulate a study’s purpose. Indeed, letters written by young people have proven to be important evidence on numerous topics. For example, Amy Harris (2009) examined correspondence between peers and siblings in 18th-century England by comparing these letters with letter-writing manuals of the time. In this way, she was able to show the different ways young people used letter writing to both teach one another the “social, cultural, and moral values” (p. 337) that were expected of them and transgress these by experimenting in ways that pushed against these very conventions. Claudia Díaz-Díaz and Mona Gleason (2016) looked at letters written by White settler children enrolled in a correspondence school in the early decades of the 20th century in the Canadian province of British Columbia. The Elementary Correspondence School opened in 1919 to offer public schooling to children who lived in places too remote and underpopulated to have the resources for an actual school. Díaz-Díaz and Gleason approached the letters discursively seeking out markers of place and space to understand how these young children interacted with, and made sense of, their rural environment.
It would seem, then, that this and the other letters in the Betty Kaufman collection have much to offer inquirers. From its form, to its content, to the materials used, to the unique perspective and experience of its author, to the context in which it is written, to its location in the University of Georgia’s archives, a single letter opens up manifold possibilities for inquiry. It also seems evident that what I have described is in fact a letter, has the structure of a letter, and all the associated expectations held within the concept of letter, such as a greeting and salutation, and a postmarked, stamped, addressed envelope. And yet, it is not a letter for me; it is not addressed to me. Is it then still a letter, or would it be better described as a document or piece of art? A search for the etymological roots of the word “letter” indicates that the term is associated both with the act of stamping or writing something down and the object—document, record—written. It also has associations with schooling since being “lettered” denotes someone who has learned their letters and can write (Harper, n.d.-b). And in these senses, Betty’s letters are both a record of a girl’s time in a particular camp and evidence of that girl’s literacy, activities, and interests.
And it is as a record of a life lived that first guided my exploration. I became curious about the camp, its progressive and anti-racist curriculum, and its director Lillian Smith (1897–1964; see, for example, Lillian E. Smith Center, https://www.piedmont.edu/lillian-e-smith-center/). I became curious about Betty and the life that she lived. From her obituary, I learned that she worked as a children’s librarian for 40 years in the Chicago Public Library where she is said to have enjoyed reading to children and performing scenes from the classics with her marionettes (Chicago Tribune, 2018). I found obituaries for her parents. From these and other sources, I learned that her mother was a member of the National League of Jewish Women (Jewish Women’s Archive, n.d.), and that she and her second husband were frequent donors to the Highlander Folk School in Mounteagle, Tennessee (Highlander Folk School Board minutes, 1964). The more I dug, the more I found; yet, none of this information helped me understand how it was that the letters spoke to me. On the contrary, this information only served to take me farther away from what had drawn me to these letters in the first place. Rather than using the letters as evidence for something else, I realized that what I wanted to understand was present in the letters themselves.
When we seek to understand something, we often overlook the fact that it is addressing us as something. This as is the opening for hermeneutic interpretation (Warnke, 2002), for the as—as an account of a 15-year-old’s camp experience, as evidence of the norms of letter writing of the time, as a discursive network of the values circulating in Betty’s network of relationship, or as an aesthetic experience—provokes the kind of gathering of matter that will be called on in this event of understanding. The questions we ask bring forward what matters to us (Gadamer, 2004). And my questions kept bringing me back to the letters themselves. What was it that made Betty’s letters present for me? (Gadamer, 2007). What drew me to them?
Betty’s Letters: Answering the Call of the Thing Itself
In a cursive script, the line, as it unravels upon the page, issues directly from this gestural movement, with all the care, feeling and devotion that goes into it. (Ingold, 2021, p. 204)
Through Betty’s letters, we hear the morning “gong” and the evening “taps.” We feel the day’s speeds and movements in each account of an activity unfolding, often in the present tense, along with quick sketches to illustrate what she is describing. The letters vividly convey Betty’s camp experiences in ways that bring their multifaceted characteristics to life. For example, I was immediately struck by the directness of the address. Bypassing the conventions of beginning with a “how are you?” she dives right in with a clear sense of her audience, “dear Mums,” “Dear Everybody,” “Dear Folks,” “Dad, honey,” or “Dearest Folkses,” as, for example, mums, dearest— Once upon a time Sam & Larry gave me a pen. This is not to be revealed on pain of death, but it has utterly, completely, and irrevocably collapsed, heaving one last sigh in the middle of a letter so that my last benison over it took the form of a capital Damn! Since then I have lived the life of a parasite, borrowing pens from more fortunate souls; but if you could possibly mail a humble pen staff, or anything of the sort, without informing S. & L., my temper would be more even. (Folder 1:21, undated, ms 1794)
I was also charmed by the tone of Betty’s writing and its dramatic qualities. Max van Manen (2014) notes, “Tone creates attunement, a heightened sensitivity to the invoked object. So to be read with tone, a text must have been written in such a manner that it potentially carries tonal qualities” (p. 264). Similarly, Tim Ingold (2021) observes, “Words are human things. They are the ways we have of making our presence felt” (p. 208). Betty’s letters clearly had a presence. What was this presence? Whether commenting on an activity she liked or didn’t like, expressing a mood, describing a process, or illustrating her accounts with mini-sketches, Betty’s presence was announcing itself. Maybe not the actual Betty, but a kind of Betty-ness nonetheless; and it was this that was addressing me. By asking such questions, I was invoking the phenomenological, as Don Welton (2002) explains, “What gives rise to phenomenological analysis is an unsettling wonder in the presence of things, which themselves come to us through certain modes or manners that are not themselves objects” (p. 13).
The first time I discerned the presence of the thing itself was when encountering Betty’s remarks on the pen leak, the ink blots I described earlier. What caught my attention was the way Betty navigated the leak, seemingly without a pause or concern that she should start over. At the moment of observing that her pen was staining the page was also recognition of the evenly spaced flowing design the leak had created. In truth, I might not even have noticed them if Betty herself had not written in parentheses: “(darn it, this pen leaks! But wasn’t it a pretty design?)” (Figure 1).
Wasn’t It a Pretty Design?
I was not interested in what the ink blots might mean conceptually. It was rather the way the whole thing came together on the page—the dots, the flow of the letter undisturbed by the ink drops, and Betty’s appreciation for its aesthetic pattern. Her description of the pattern seems similar to how David Prall (1924) described an aesthetic response to works of art: One is simply struck with them, with form itself; art moves us instantaneously or not at all. It may take years before we see anything very complex as beautiful; but when we do, it is at a glance, between breaths. (p. 124)
There was an artfulness to Betty’s letters beckoning for recognition and it was this transformation from object to artwork that I was experiencing. Cathie Pearce (2019) observed that this happens during archival research at times: “Any archive is more than just an interpretative site. It has tactile sense, emotional sense, imaginary sense, physical, and material sense that cannot be ignored” (p. 1117). I did not pause and take note of the aesthetic qualities inherent in Betty’s letters; rather, the aesthetic qualities of her letters took hold of me, and I found myself wondering how? What sense can I make of this aesthetic experience?
When something addresses us, and we respond, we are allowing our very being to be put into question (Caputo, 2018). Being addressed, then, is less an invitation than it is responding to an authority making a demand on us. The thing beckoning us is signaling that it has something to say in the here and now. To understand what it is saying requires that we attend to the aesthetic contours of the experience that brings its being into definition. Having turned toward the thing asserting itself, I now had to find a way to reveal its mode of being.
Betty’s Letters: Attuning to Their Aesthetic Contours
By turning to aesthetics as the mode that evoked wonder, I am following Yuriko Saito (2017) in “restoring aesthetics to its original task: investigating the nature of experiences gained through sensory perception and sensibility” (p. 1). An aesthetic experience, Hans-Georg Gadamer (2004) noted, “is not just one kind of experience among others, but represents the essence of experience per se” (p. 60). Understanding the experience of the aesthetic, then, helps us penetrate the mode of being of hermeneutical experience, which Gadamer contends, opens us to understanding. Hermeneutical experience, he wrote, “is not that something is outside and desires admission. Rather, we are possessed by something and precisely by means of it we are opened up for the new, the different, the true” (Gadamer, 2007, p. 82). This suggests that to understand anything requires that we turn our attention toward it. What does this attentiveness look like? How does it manifest as aesthetic experience? Saito (2017) suggested that an aesthetic experience with the ordinary or extraordinary can be made visible by “paying attention and bringing background to the foreground” (p. 24).
An Aesthetic Experience Is an Answer to a Call
My transition from viewing Betty’s letters as historical objects to a thing manifesting as an aesthetic being meant that they could no longer be objectified. In their refusal to be ignored, the script and images on the page demanded attention; they asserted themselves as something that had something meaningful to say. I began to listen, although I was uncertain what it was I was listening for. As I read, I took note of moments in the writing that stood out for their Betty-ness. I also wondered and wandered. I questioned, often answering my own questions by following new paths. I understood that tracing the contours of an aesthetic object meant that I should not assume the existence of a predefined object as if my questions were aimed at digging up answers to support this discovery. Rather, my correspondence with the thing unfolding was itself an integral part of the tale I would be telling (Ingold, 2021). Aesthetics transformed my relationship to the object. It is what connected me to Betty’s letters. Besides the earnestness and directness of her accounts, Betty had a knack for showing the unfolding of experience. Often this was done in the temporal present; pulling the reader directly into the flow of action. For instance, this undated letter starts off with Betty stating that she will take a random day and tell about it: Dear Everybody, I’m writing only because I feel like it, cause no letters came to encourage me. Nothing special’s happened, so I’ll just take any day—Wednesday for instance—and tell you everything that happens. Well, Clang—clang—clang—clang—and the day’s begun! I just can’t stay in bed with the whole world all sunshiny outside. So I jump up and make up myself and my bed. Pretty soon the second gong rings, and that’s first call to breakfast. Nobody ever goes up till second call, and then do we run! (Folder 1:20, undated, ms 1794)
She continues through breakfast, through finding her daily schedule, through tennis, through crafts, through dancing, through lunch, often inserting little sketches (see Figure 2).
Clang-Clang-Clang-Clang
and she continues: Clang! At last rest hours’ over. Are you ready to go up to the porch to get our afternoon punch? Aw, hurry. 4:45, and I have swimming. It’s a long climb down to the pool, but we have so much fun splashing around that it’s worth it. And now for the trudge up! It’s back-breaking. But here’s a pretty leaf for spatter-printing! I never dreamed there were any on the swimming pool trail. (Folder 1:20, undated, ms 1794)
“But here’s a pretty leaf for spatter-printing! I never dreamed there were any on the swimming pool trail.” Why should I care that she took note of this leaf on the swimming pool trail? What is it about this small act of noticing that makes me nod in recognition of the aesthetic being of the world unfolding between us? Philip Jackson (1998) observes, “To perceive an object is not simply to see, hear, smell, taste, or touch it. It is to make sense of what one senses, to partake of its meaning” (p. 57).
Reading Betty’s letters aesthetically opens the multivalence of sense. The words form lines that my eyes follow dutifully as these fill the page as if written in one fluid motion. But the words are not to be read equally. Rather, my eyes are called to notice words that are underlined, the use of onomatopoeia, the vivid imagery, the quickly sketched illustrations. The words it seems are begging me to not only read them but also to experience them. They do not point me away from what they are saying toward the camp activities described. Rather they gather themselves into themselves, right there on the page, expressively, agentively, persuasively, and I am called to care, to take note, to be excited, to feel indignity, to be amazed. An artwork, John Caputo (2018) notes, is not a play of formal properties but a magnetic centre into which everyone is drawn who experiences its play, that is, its truth. What sort of truth? The truth of a world-disclosure, of a form of life, of a mode of being-in-the-world, a truth it alone is uniquely able to open up, and a truth that is visited upon me. (p. 94)
An Aesthetic Experience Is Temporally Paradoxical
To turn to the thing itself, in its aesthetic manifestation, asks us to take note of its mode of persuasion; its particular rhythms, displays of speeds and motion, topological shifts and contours. Its mode of presentation shapes our embodied response, the rhythm of our breathing, the direction of our thinking, and they too become part of the unfolding movement of understanding. Maria Tamboukou (2017) remarks, “archival research . . . is in itself an event, an eruption that may radically shift our habitual ways of reasoning and understanding” (p. 84). Furthermore, this is not an isolated shift, but an attunement that moves along with the many shifts, currents, and adjustments that happen as we handle the materials. Sometimes this involves reading along and participating earnestly in the rich, lived description, as with Betty’s reconstruction of a typical day. At other times, this involves embracing a surprising and felt mutuality, as I did with Betty’s appreciation for the beauty of the leak pattern and of the leaf on the path.
In addition to interrupting a linear notion of time by juxtaposing experiences of immediacy with those requiring a more gradual manifestation, the temporality of an aesthetic experience is also changed by the thing itself. The power of the address I felt reading Betty’s letters altered my state of attentiveness. Those moments slowed me down, inviting me to dwell with rather than carry out a mere scanning of what was in front of me. This, in turn, meant that I had to make time to listen and look, returning again and again to what might be revealed as it appears that nothing worth understanding is revealed all at once. Gadamer (2007) notes that a work of art is more like “a saga, because . . . the assertion it makes will speak over and over again” (p. 212), revealing more of itself through each moment of correspondence.
These temporal shifts are also present, or overlooked altogether, in the unfolding understanding. That is, whereas certain qualities of aesthetic experience might be immediate, elicit a chuckle, or send a shiver through our bodies, others can be more subtle and gradual. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (2006) describes such an experience: While you may feel comfortable right from the start chatting, drinking your bourbon, or reading a book in one of them, you will but gradually (if ever) become aware how much this good feeling is the result of the chair’s superior design. The emphasis is on “gradually” here, as opposed to the suddenness with which the previously discussed modality of aesthetic experience interrupts the everyday. Rather than an imposed-upon interruption or an epiphany, a gradual process of emergence is the form of aesthetic experience here. (p. 310)
Gumbrecht stated it is difficult to pinpoint the moment when an everyday experience shifts from a taken-for-granted state to becoming an object that chisels its way into our awareness. The turn, however, is worth noting as these are often aspects of experience that deflected attention. For example, while it might seem unlikely that the kind of paper Betty used would make a difference, it did. I found myself drawn more to the thick absorbent-like paper over the thin almost transparent rice paper. The thinner the paper, the harder it was for me to decipher what was written, causing the paper itself to interfere with my enjoyability and therefore failing to recede into the background the way the thicker paper was able to do. I also found that as she got older, her handwriting got smaller, and her tone more dispassionate although still full of detail (see Figure 3 as an example). As reading all the letters was not necessary for this project, I attended more closely to the letters that were easier to read.
Folding Pamphlets in Miss Lil’s Office
An Aesthetic Experience Reveals the Truth of Human Finitude
Another aspect of Betty’s letters I loved were the frequent sketches. Betty not only used punctuation expressively, but she also illustrated her letters, which added another dimension to their aesthetic appeal. Although simple drawings, many of these required no, or very little, additional information to be intelligible (see Figures 4 and 5).
Terrible Time Choosing
Boy, I’d Better Have a Figure
In my search for more information about the camp, I found a camp newsletter that had been sent to parents in another collection in the Hargrett Library (Joan Titus Collection). I was surprised to see that these were illustrated in the same style as Betty’s letters (Figure 6). Thinking they might have asked Betty to illustrate the camp stationary, I tried to find any reference to the illustrator. Not only did I not find any acknowledgment for the illustrations, I found evidence that their inclusion preceded the dates of Betty’s stay. At first, I admit to being disappointed. Somehow I felt this diminished Betty’s accomplishments.
Letter to Parents June 1943
My disappointment forced me to reckon with a prejudice about copying, which I thought I had overcome long ago. As someone who has always been interested in young people’s capacities for making sense of their own experiences, I was already oriented toward listening to Betty’s unique voice with respect. I also viewed children’s art as just another facet of their multimodal expressivity and have written about the way children easily cross illusionary boundaries between visual, verbal, kinesthetic, and other modalities (Freeman, 1984). But as Gumbrecht (2006) remarks, there are moments “in which the Being of things—quite literally—is ‘growing on us’” (p. 312). This was such a moment. Looking again, and more closely, I could see that it did not matter whether Betty found inspiration in the designs surrounding her, because only Betty was able to assemble words and images in the unique way that she had. Art does not copy life, Caputo (2018) explains, but functions more as an “intensification of reality, more like a zoom lens that picks out something, sometimes very small or seemingly insignificant, and produces a magnification of it in which reality itself is made to shine in all its depth and beauty” (pp. 90–91). Rather than diminish Betty’s aesthetic performance, the illustrations accentuated the complex way these letters both expressed and extended Betty’s camp experiences.
Importantly, the recognition of my own response also highlighted for me the realization that someone else might have dismissed Betty’s letters entirely. Someone else might have found these to be insignificant as she was just age 15 years, just a girl, just a camper rather than the adult producer of the camp. And isn’t it interesting that the meaning of this word just, which shares an etymological root with the word justice, changed from being a spatial term that pointed to “exactness” and “precision” to one suggesting a “merely” or a “barely” (Harper, n.d.-a). My predisposition toward the aesthetic in Betty’s letters, then, formed the point where the letters and my response joined in mutual reciprocity to penetrate the very being of that which I was trying to understand.
Saito (2017) remarks that if we empty our minds of all preconceived notions about the thing we are encountering, or approach it as nothing, rather than, as I am doing here with Betty’s letters, as something, as an aesthetic object, as a work of art, then we devoid ourselves learning about aesthetics, art, and understanding (Saito, 2017; Warnke, 2002). As Caputo (2018) points out, “things do not have an essence, which would spell death to them, but an ongoing, living history” (p. 100). How we attend to anything, then, how we question, or don’t question, continues interpretive conversations about matters we care about that have no ending. But this does not make them pointless.
Understanding’s Aesthetic Contours
Something about Betty’s letters spoke to me. I was taken in by their earnestness, fluidity of expression, and aliveness. I identified these qualities as aesthetic and noted that a turn to the aesthetic requires an attunement to the thing itself in its uniqueness, which is more vividly revealed by engaging with a particular type of aesthetic focus. Gadamer (2007) stated that one quality of a work of art is that it “stands firm against every transforming of it into some other form of statement” (p. 414). By orienting myself to Betty’s letters as works of art, I was embracing a hermeneutic stance that assumes that a close examination of the work can provide an understanding of some aspect of its being. In other words, if I was to understand something about this work, “I must assume that it has a point to make” (Warnke, 2002, p. 323). Attuning myself to Betty’s letters does not require a theoretical stance, but neither is it atheoretical. Gadamer (2007) noted that the original Greek sense of the word theoria, meant “to be fully there” (p. 213), that is, fully present as a spectator (reader) and player (interpreter) in the event. Understanding, then, involves opening ourselves up to the strengths and limitations of each event of meaning making in its unfolding.
I use the word contour as a way to describe the aesthetic qualities permeating Betty’s letters. Contour as a concept denotes both the tracing of an outline and the molding of something into shape. As such, it has the topological connotations that supports the multimodality of the experience I wish to convey. Contour also points to the impermanence and incompleteness of a trace that signals the ambiguity of understanding. As Laura-Lee Kearns (2015) notes, “The truths that wonder holds cannot be contained; they are evolving, in the process of becoming, and so always open to new possibilities” (p. 101).
What I believe I have understood about understanding is that Betty’s words and images are tangible. They are lines of thought that can be followed. Mute words do carry sound, motion, and affect (Gadamer, 2007). Through Betty’s letters, a persona emerges (Tamboukou, 2017) as if it were a real being. Through Betty’s letters, relationships are kept alive. Through Betty’s letters, the leaf on the path shines and there is joy for us too in its finding. And, although I did not live a life like Betty’s, and my joy is not her joy, joy connects us across time and place. The happiness jumping up and down on the page (see Figure 7) spreads out beyond Betty’s time, and now, through these words, beyond my own.
I’m So Happy
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
