I've received my first ever email4. It said Hello how are you. And I have replied to it.
Well if I'd been asked something like that on the forum, I might have felt funny about replying. I mean it doesn't seem right to fill up the forum with remarks about how one is. But in email it felt perfectly fine to answer that kind of question. So I think email4 is already beginning to prove its worth.
Also, because I was answering one question, I felt it would be OK to ask two questions in return. This meant that even if I made one of the questions simply "how are you?" (which is what I did), I would still have another question left over.
Now, here's the thing: to all intents and purposes, as there are only two people on the list at the moment, no one except my correspondent and me will ever be able to know how I said I am in answer to the question which I was asked. And for that matter, of the two questions which I asked in return, no one except my correspondent and me will ever be able to know what the second question was.
What unarchived means is that the system does not in any way preserve the emails that are sent through it. There is another kind of mailman list, which is archived, which means that when new people join the list later on they can read back through what has been sent so far to bring themselves up to date. This is right for lists that are discussing ideas or telling a story. But our kind of list is unarchived.
The two emails which have already been processed through the list are now gone forever. Maybe there is some electromagnetic radiation travelling through the solar system and bearing the faint impression of those emails as they passed through the mail server, and maybe this electromagnetic radiation is now searching lovingly and longingly for rocks on which to caress its message as it flits by --- but by now, this radiation will be well outside the orbit of Pluto, where caressable rocks are increasingly hard to find. According to wikipedia it only takes about 5 hours for electromagnetic radiation to get as far as Pluto. After that ... le silence eternel des ces espaces infinis.
That phrase is by Pascal, by the way.
Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie.
Here is another thing about Pascal,
On 23 November 1654, between 10:30 and 12:30 at night, Pascal had an intense religious vision and immediately recorded the experience in a brief note to himself which began: "Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and the scholars..." and concluded by quoting Psalm 119:16: "I will not forget thy word. Amen." He seems to have carefully sewn this document into his coat and always transferred it when he changed clothes; a servant discovered it only by chance after his death.
The premise of the email list is that although extraordinary experiences may happen most particularly to extraordinary people like Pascal, still --- owing to the democracy of spirit --- somewhat extraordinary experiences may also happen, sometimes, to quite ordinary people like us. And an email list could be the perfect medium for discussing these experiences. Obviously Pascal did not feel like publishing his account of his experience in a public forum, but if he had been on an unarchived email list ...... well, then, he just might have felt OK about putting it on the list. Which would have saved him an enormous amount of trouble with needle and thread.
