Dear Oscar,

Your voice was heard, for a while, because you were fashionable, because you knew how to move in the circles which mediated the voices of your age. It was something of a considered voice, as the organs of repetition were those of the print media, and so long diatribes could be printed, allowing views to be fully elucidated.

That is no longer the case.

Now we are in the age of ‘soundbites’, of ‘tweets’, of ‘instagram’. and so the only means of communication that attract mass consumption are momentary, barely registered, and in no way trying to uncover depths of meaning. It is surface and superficiality which are promoted nowadays, not research and thoroughness. In fact it is even being said that we have entered the age of ‘post truth’, where not even the truth itself has any currency or validity; it seems that what we believe is now more significant than what is true.

We know what is believed about you, depending upon one’s perspective, and those perspectives promoted within one’s culture and society. I am sure that in some parts of the globe you would be seen as totally irrelevant, just some man who once said some things and who did some other things, and so what? Your voice was heard within your own society but very possibly not in the societies of others who also swarmed the globe during your lifetime. Our self-aggrandisement makes us think that we are universal and timeless, when in fact we are all just cries in the wilderness, some louder than others, some more effective at gaining attention than others, depending upon circumstance, opportunity, relevance, positioning, privilege. You had all of these things, briefly, and you used them well, rode the wave of your success, until it fed your ego to such gargantuan excess that you thought you were right when you could very easily be proven wrong.

Whether or not you were right or wrong.

Whether or not truth prevailed.

It was just what everyone believed at the time.

I write here because I cannot reach you, you are dead and gone, and yet there are still so many things unresolved about your rather brief existence, so many questions left unanswered. More significantly, so many questions that still reverberate around the world to this very day. What is a society to do with its misfits? What if what they say has a poignant relevance? How can we collectively react to shifting sands, changing times?

It is a pleasure to stay in communion with you, Oscar dear.

Your friend,

Algernon B. Duffoure.