Who can doubt Emily Dickinson would have launched a Substack – or some other Internet portal where she could post her propulsive poems?
No use peddling them to her Amherst neighbors! All fine people in their way – mostly all – but busy with their business – hardly readers. And the few who read – the ladies in the library’s classics group, who took tea together Tuesdays – hardly her sort! Old maids! – starchy, censorious, Bowdlerizers, tittle-tattlers. Some might say the same of her – unwed, never likely to be – but that was her choice, not her fate. Why marry to be bored? Husbands were not like frocks: you picked one, however plain, because you had to wear something!
But with a Substack page! Her words might wriggle past her three thousand Amherst townsfolk to, well, Boston, Philadelphia, Canada, even London! Surely among such a multitude mightn’t there be one, maybe a dozen, who dreamed as she dreamed?
The Internet, it is argued, destroys community by permitting neighbors never to interact. This is true. I could live my whole life online, unless in need of dentist or vet. Community is a learned skill and if we never practice, we’ll live atomized, estranged, fearful of folks we don’t know how to greet. This is happening in America today: inept at combining, we divide into savage tribes.
The Internet miraculously convenes a new sort of community, hitherto unknown: call it a sodality of soulmates. Not geographically or professionally based, not a religious or political grouping, but a few likeminded souls together, online, from anywhere on earth, whose members, by their affiliation and conversation, feel less alone. Bedford, New York, where I and my kids were raised, numbered as few poetry-lovers as Emily Dickinson’s Amherst – I never met a one – but now I revel in a choir of angels – daily! – thousands this morning will share these thoughts! So companioned, think how much less lonely Emily would have been in her spare clean bedroom with its white muslin curtains and door strictly shut.
Happier? Who can doubt. A mightier poet? Who can say. Emily herself saw her loneliness as strength:
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedThis is my letter to the WorldThat never wrote to Me—The simple News that Nature told—With tender Majesty
Her Message is committedTo Hands I cannot see—For love of Her—Sweet—countrymen—Judge tenderly—of Me
She delighted in the exclusivity of her conversation with her kind:
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedI’m Nobody! Who are you?Are you – Nobody – too? Then there’s a pair of us! Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!
How dreary – to be – Somebody!How public – like a Frog – To tell one’s name – the livelong June – To an admiring Bog!
Convivial conversation demands less heroism than seclusion: we buck each other up. Yet what a relief to learn, via clicks and likes, one is less alone!
What makes these sodalities precious – and they are legion on the glossolalic Web – is their spontaneity. We are here not from duty, obligation, social pressure, but because we want to be. When I started these daily missives a decade ago, friends read them to be friends. Now I know maybe one of a hundred readers, if that. Shared interests, enthusiasms, convictions, dread assemble us, not personal ties.
A society of electronic emanations differs from an actual community and is no substitute for it. We need to experience real people in their astonishing variety not just a self-selected few. We need to endure the affronts of thugs and tedium of bores. But what a relief to revisit soulmates for these few minutes, to remind ourselves we are neither weird nor bereft.