Lost arts

Jess, posted this the other day, and I think it must be because she commented on it that I saw it on facebook. It's an example of handwriting, posted on 702 ABC facebook page, from a prison letter, and came with a query as to whether we had lost the art of handwriting. What made me curious is that most people said they couldn't read it, so I had a go and could read it with ease. I do have rather old-fashioned decorative cursive writing myself, that people often comment on. What graphologists would read about my personality from it I don't know. (Curiously, I think my handwriting is quite like my Mum's and my Nanna's and my Mum reckons my younger sister's strange handwriting is like my Dad's, when she never actually met my Dad.)

Anyway, I actually thought the content of the letter was rather beautiful. At first I thought it must be a "romantic" letter, but given it's from Andrew, and it's about Jim, probably not, which makes it an even more unusual expression of affection. I think we have lost this art, of so beautifully articulating our affections, of writing such a letter to the mother of someone who presumably has died, even more so than the art of handwriting. I have copied out below what it actually says, which is not what I expected to read from a prisoner called "Moonlight", though it would seem he might have been a preacher before he decided to rob a bank then ride off into the sunset and become a bushranger.

My dearest Mrs Nesbitt,

To the Mother of Jim no colder

address would be true, My heart to yours

is the same as to my own dearest Mother.

Jim's sisters are my sisters, his friends

my friends, his hopes were my hopes, his

grave will be my resting place and I

trust I may be worthy to be with him

when we shall all meet to part no

more, when an all-seeing God who

can read all hearts will be the Judge.