Written any Letters Lately?

We had some people over for dinner a few days ago, and yesterday I received a lovely, handwritten, mailed-with-a-stamp thank you note! Imagine—something personal in the postal mail!

Like most people, I rarely use paper mail any more. Electronic communication is a wonderful invention, but like all forms of progress, it giveth and it taketh away. It giveth the power to communicate instantaneously with anyone (or a million anyones) anywhere. It taketh away the joy of the letter.

Unlike a polite thank-you note written in a unique hand on a card decorated with Van Gogh’s sunflowers, every piece of electronic communication looks like every other piece. A business memo looks no different than a letter from a friend. Did I say letter? Who writes letters any more? Everything’s a message, and a message is decidedly not a letter. A message is brief, purposeful, ephemeral, impersonal, and decidedly unpoetic (though I’m sure the creative spelling of text messages will one day be studied by linguists and psychologists). A note is also brief and usually single-minded, but it’s written in someone’s uniquely personal handwriting on carefully chosen paper. The writer’s fingerprints, literal and figurative, are all over it.

Then there’s that obsolete indulgence the letter, the mainstay of written communication among friends and lovers for more than twenty centuries. Letters can be held in your hand, caressed, folded and unfolded until they’re smeared and torn. Letters can be long, meandering, deep, questioning, anguished, hilarious, wise, loving, sad. Letters can reveal yourself to you. Letters can lift your heart and they can break it. It’s hard to imagine an email—or, god forbid, a text message—with that kind of power. Another thing that made letters powerful is that you could linger over them. You rarely got so many that you didn’t have time to pore over them as many times as you wanted. How can you pore over an e-message when dozens more are always there demanding your attention?

I’ve been writing letters since I could lift a pen, long, detailed, pour-out-your-heart epistles to everyone from Santa Claus and God to grade-school friends I couldn’t get together with over the summer, high school friends who sat three rows away, far-flung college buddies, a beloved aunt who’d just shared her latest favorite read, a boyfriend in a combat zone. I’d spend hours choosing stationery—did I feel pink or purple that day?—and the right pen, my all-time favorite being the Scripto with turquoise ink that conveyed my deepest thoughts at thirteen. I’d write for hours; fifteen or twenty pages wasn’t unusual. And there was nothing like the joy of getting back a bulging, lilac-scented envelope with my girlfriend’s latest experiments in handwriting, or, later, the single page filled with the almost-illegible thoughts of my husband-to-be in combat, signed “My love.” Does anyone type “My love” at the end of an email? Can electronic files possibly replace a stack of love letters tied with a ribbon and kept for generations?

Not only have letters disappeared; now I hear that cursive writing is no longer taught in some schools. “Digital natives” who play with keyboards from the time they can point their fingers don’t need it. Nor will they ever need to guess at the handwriting on an envelope; the sender’s name is the first thing they see. But they’ll never know the sweet thrill of pulling an envelope out of a box and seeing there the familiar scrawl of a person they’ve been waiting to hear from. (Oh, I forgot, waiting is obsolete too.)

Okay, so I’ve lived long enough to sound like an old granny whose every sentence begins with “In my day.” Au contraire, it’s still my day, and I love the convenience of electronic communication. But I’m going to hold on to my flower-covered note cards and take the time to use them now and then. I’m going to occasionally hand-write a letter on paper to my grandson, even if his mother has to read it to him because he doesn’t understand cursive. And I’m going to hope that The Letter—uniquely personal, thoughtful, and occasionally very long—is not entirely replaced by The Message.