For "gone viral' items are usually tinsel-trivial popular trash, and so for example top viral videos this month include 'Melania Trump's Change Of Expression After Smiling At Ivanka Goes Viral' and 'Kung Fu Master Shows Off His Balls Of Steel'.

But now, suddenly, also acknowledged to have truly "gone viral" is a quietly bewitching piece of 1902 footage belonging to New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

Lasting just two hypnotising minutes, it shows a new-fangled 'flying train' public transport system meandering through and above a German city, Wuppertal.

As well as its universal appeals, the MoMA clip has a special resonance for Canberrans because it shows off and celebrates a marvellous and new-fangled mode of public transport. Canberrans continue to agonise over new-fangled light rail (as I write, its proposed expansion and cost is a knicker-knotting election issue and front-page news story). But here in MoMA's glimpse of Germany in 1902 is a public transport invention somehow more sophisticatedly inventive than Canberra's whisper-quiet 2020 trams.

How futuristic the Wuppertalers (living in horse-drawn times) must have found their flying train! Did any conservative Wuppertalers stubbornly fight the proposed 'flying train' the way fossilised Canberrans fight light rail? Did they write fierce anti-flying-train/pro-horse letters to The Wuppertal Times?

The strange loveliness of the MoMA clip involves how we see the good people of Wuppertal (all of them long gone now to their Great Reward) unselfconsciously going about their work and play in a town beside a river that, just like them, we see flowing along at its own chosen 1902 speed.

The clip is saying something somehow delightful and melancholy at the same time, about human inventiveness, about how time's ever-rolling stream bears all its sons and daughters away.

One receives so few actual letters these days that I barely recognised the white-enveloped object in my letter box.

I'd only peeked into the cobwebbed gloom of the letter box to check on the welfare of the spiders that are welcome, long-time tenants there.

Their peace and quiet had been disturbed by the once-a-year event of the delivery of an actual letter. A letter! Addressed to ME!

It was with a spasm of nostalgia (for once upon a time all mail came like this) I opened the envelope and found it was from the Labor member from Murrumbidgee, Chris Steel.

Addressing me familiarly as "Dear Ian", his heartfelt letter crooned to me that I will be a brick short of a load if I don't vote Labor at next month's election.

The arrival of Steel's sweet old-fashioned form of communication coincides with the US Postal Service being so much in the political news. Its use as a political weapon (Trump trying to hornswoggle and deny postal voting) and its run-down state is a source of distress for millions of Americans who have a historical-sentimental fondness for it.

And in a new triggered-by-these-times hymn of praise to the Service (and to the "magic" and "enfolded intimacy" of old-fashioned letters, like Chris Steel's letter to me), American poet A.E. Stallings notes with feeling the Service's unofficial motto/creed. It is "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds".

Stallings finds in the motto a "nobility of diction and sentiment that suits the noble service of delivering public and private correspondence".

"That it is a quotation from somewhere isn't surprising," Stallings continues.

"When the architect William Mitchell Kendall was working on the New York General Post Office, which opened in 1914, he wanted a fitting motto to chisel above its entrance.

''The son of a classics scholar, he hit upon a (translated) passage out of Herodotus's history of the Persian invasion of Greece ... The phrase comes where Herodotus is describing the astounding efficiency of the 'pony express' courier system of the Persian Empire under Xerxes."

I mention this not only because it is so charming but also because it makes a refreshing change at this time (the US led by an ignoble ignoramus who has never read a book, let alone a book by Herodotus) to remind ourselves of the dear USA's better, learned, thinking, noble side.