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Absence
    We are by September and yet my flowers are bold as June. Amherst has gone to Eden
.
    Emily Dickinson to Elizabeth Holland, October 1870
    “REAL TIME” —which isn’t time at all, but rather simultaneity—seems these days always to be our goal in communicating between one place and another. So much so that one must ask: was the old passage of days and weeks, as letters traveled, “false time”?
    A telephone call or instant message actually conveys one
place
to another, whereas letters always conveyed not only a place but a time as well, one that had already passed. If written vividly enough, they made the recipient forget that what he was reading about had actually taken place weeks before—the way an astronomer looking at the explosion of a star has to remember that he is in fact looking into the past, at something that happened ages ago and whose light is only now being delivered.
    Distance—the fact that you are there and I am not—is the hardest fact against which letters were for centuries written, even if the distance was short and temporary, as it was between Elizabeth Holland in New York and Emily Dickinson in Massachusetts. Letters talked across it with information and sentiment, putting themselves at the service of both practical necessity and emotional luxury. Here in this first chapter we have news from elsewhere, letters containing anything at all and nothing in particular, catchall correspondence that never would have come into existence had its writer, or reader, just stayed home.
     
    THE WARRING red and white roses of Lancaster and York still bloom against all the black ink spilled throughout the fifteenth century by one embattled Norfolk family. The Paston Letters are a medieval document-drama, crammed with besieged castles, arranged marriages, tournaments, knightings, plague, lawsuits, highwaymen, pilgrimages and falconry. The members of the prosperous but always-imperilled Paston clan—along with their retainers, allies, patrons and foes—create, year by year, a sort of prose
Canterbury Tales
, a chronicle ripe with cunning and calamity. Each packet of “tidings” between home and London (where a father or brother is usually pursuing family interests) nearly bursts its seal with urgency. So much
depends
on these letters. When the Pastons ask for news of one another, they’re not being polite. They require tidings on the spot. In the decades just before Richard III offered his kingdom for a horse, the Pastons would have given at least one manor house for a telephone.
    At the heart of this multigenerational mini-series stand Margaret Paston and her husband John, a lawyer often away at the capital’s Inner Temple. Affection and gossip aren’t absent from their correspondence, but when Margaret wishes that John “be not chary of writing letters,” and tells him she “would have one every day,” she’s asking that they be stuffed with information, not sealed with a kiss. The two-way traffic is, if anything, more crucial to him than her. Margaret offers, for example, her sense of what the local poor are wishing from the parliament in which her husband now sits: “they live in hope that you should set a way that they might live in better peace in this country than they have done before, and that wool should be provided for so that it should not go out of this land as it has been allowed to do before.” She gives John warnings of his enemies (“I pray you heartily beware how you walk there and have a good fellowship with you when you walk out. The Lord Moleyns has a company of scoundrels with him that care not what they do”), and she supplies news of their predations close to home. Most spectacular is her report, on October 27, 1465, of how the duke of Suffolk’smen have come to one Paston property and “ransacked the church and bore away all the goods that were left there, both of ours and of the tenants, and even stood upon the high altar and ransacked the images and took