Carved initials and other letters to nobody in particular

Somebody cut their initials into that tree about thirty years ago, judging by how far the bark has healed over. They were probably young. They almost certainly do not live here now. They had no plan for who would read it and no expectation of ever finding out.

The habit turns up everywhere and it does not need a technology. Names scratched into stone at monuments. A date and two sets of initials in the corner of a concrete pavement, set down while it was wet and permanent ever since. Pencil in the margin of a library book, disagreeing with a paragraph, addressed to nobody. A note tucked inside a secondhand paperback that was meant for one person and is now being read by a fourth. Bench plaques in parks, which are the most formal version and are quietly one of the strangest: a piece of civic furniture whose real function is to tell passing strangers that someone liked sitting here.

Messages in bottles, of course, though those are more famous than common. The thing they all share is a sender with no addressee. The writer knows a reader will exist. They know nothing else about them and will never learn anything more.

It is not communication, quite

Ordinary communication assumes a loop. You say something, someone receives it, something comes back, and the coming back is what tells you the first part worked. Take the return path away and most of what we call talking stops making sense.

These messages have no return path by design. That is not an unfortunate limitation the writer would remove if they could. Plenty of people who carve initials into a tree have perfectly good ways of contacting their friends. They are not doing this instead of a conversation. They are doing something a conversation cannot do. A message with no reply is not a failed message, in other words. It is a different kind of message, and it should be judged by whether it did that other job rather than by the silence that follows it.

What the writer is actually after

Three things, mostly, in various mixtures.

The first is durability. Everything about a person is temporary and they know it. The initials will outlast the relationship that prompted them, which the person carving them may already suspect. Writing on something that persists is a way of borrowing a little permanence from an object, and it works, in a limited way, which is why so much of it survives.

The second is witness. Not a specific witness, just the fact of one. Something happened, or somebody felt something, and it seems intolerable that it should occur entirely unobserved and then stop. So a mark goes down. The mark does not describe the event to anyone in particular. It only establishes that the event is now in the world in some form, rather than only in one head where it will eventually be lost.

The third is the one people rarely admit, and it is the most interesting: the writer is talking to themselves, and they need a stranger present in order to do it properly. Say something out loud to nobody and it stays vague. Say it to an imagined reader, even one with no face, and suddenly you have to be clear. You have to pick words. The stranger is not the audience so much as the condition that makes the sentence honest.

Marginalia, which is the best case

Notes in the margins of borrowed and secondhand books are my favourite version, because there the whole thing is visible.

Somebody argued with a paragraph in pencil. They were not writing for you. They were thinking, and thinking in a book requires a pencil, and the pencil produced a permanent record of a mind in motion on a Thursday in some year they did not note. Then the book moved on. And now you are reading the paragraph and the objection at the same time, and you have company you did not ask for and cannot thank.

The effect is strongest when the note is unremarkable. A grand pronouncement in a margin is just someone showing off for a future audience. A small pencilled no beside a sentence is the real thing, because it was written without any thought of being read, which is exactly what makes it worth reading.

The reader's side

We have been describing the writer. The reader gets something too, and it is not sympathy.

Finding one of these is a specific and slightly vertiginous experience: evidence that the place you are standing in was fully occupied by somebody else's life before you got here. Not in an abstract way, in a way you can see. Someone sat on this bench often enough that their family paid to say so. Someone was here, sixty years ago, in love, with a knife.

That does not comfort exactly. It reorients. You are less the centre of the scene than you were a minute ago, which sounds diminishing and mostly is not. Being briefly held in mind by someone who will never know you runs in both directions, and the reader's end of it is the less discussed half.

What strikes me most is how little the medium matters. The tree, the wet concrete, the margin, the bottle and the bench plaque are not variations on a modern impulse. They are the impulse, and everything built since is a place for it to go.

What all of them need in common is only two conditions: that the mark persists longer than the moment, and that the writer cannot control who finds it. Remove either one and the act changes into something else. A note you can delete is a draft. A note addressed to a specific person is a letter, which is a fine thing and a different one, and letters written to people who will never read them are stranger still.

The initials are still in the tree. Nobody involved is checking. That was never what it was for.