Letters

Thursday, Jan 2, 2025 at 8:42 PM

It just hit me that I'm so old that I remember having to write a letter to a friend in another state to let them know I wanted to come visit, because telling them via a long distance call would have been too expensive.

While I'm quick to embrace the convenience of being able to simply text someone when I'm planning to breeze through their town, our ability to send paragraph-long messages and talk for hours on the phone with no danger of extra charges has, as far as I can see, made our communications far less mindful than they've ever been. Even an email seems to warrant more thought and reflection (and patience regarding a response) than a text or voicemail.

For example: who remembers answering machines? I do; yet how quick we've all been to forget that, when someone left a voicemail, they expected the recipient to not hear it for several hours, at least. It was a while before we had the technology to be able to call and retrieve our messages remotely, and returning home from work or school or an outing generally entailed playing back our cassette filled with voice messages as we hung up our coats, took off our shoes, put away our groceries and flipped through the paper mail. Eventually, at some future point, we'd get back to them.

Today, many admit that not only do they just not bother leaving a voicemail if the other party doesn't answer, they also don't even bother to listen to voicemails. If you weren't aware of that, I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news. You may have had an inkling of it if you've ever been on the receiving end of the automated message: "This mailbox is full. [BEEP]".

But back to letters for a moment: letters, that is, the process of writing letters, forces the writer to apply more attention to the words put on paper. Writing, as opposed to typing, is slower, and the imposed pace causes us to think more about what's being said. We edit, reword, cross out, insert with a caret, and drive our thoughts through several incarnations before sending them off in a sealed envelope. Once we wet the glue and apply the stamp and place it in a postbox (or the hands of our postal carrier), that's it. No 'unsend' function. Kind of fatalistic, if you think about it.

On the other hand, the act of "letting go" that a letter requires on the part of the sender is one of the things that can make it most endearing to the recipient. How often have the examination of letters left behind by famous or notorious or historically significant people given us a window into their experiences, relationships, personalities? It's not only part of an archive of one's thought, but also the emotions it conjures in the receiver. Haven't you ever found an old letter and delighted in re-reading it? Or maybe felt the opposite, and yet marveled at it's ability to surface such profound feeling again? Pretty powerful stuff. Letters between my friends and I when we were young contained drawings, song lyrics, quotes, and sometimes ephemera like articles and little souvenirs. Not quite the same as attaching a photo or screenshot to an email or DM.

I love getting letters: my phone vibrating makes me jump in fear, but a letter in the mailbox always makes me smile. Go figure.

In the future, will our children, or grandchildren, or whomever we've left behind, go through our emails or Facebook posts with the same wonder as old letters? I'm not saying these things don't have value: of course, when we lose someone, we might try to bring them back to life with their old Spotify playlists or scroll wistfully down a collage of their Instagram posts. We might replay a voice note or cell phone video. All these things have emotional meaning. Letters, however, are more tangible. It would be nice if we could add them to the time capsule of a life.

The point here, however, is that the archival letter can't be unearthed and treasured if we don't write them. Our culture is so fascinated by enumerating things we need to "normalize" again; how about adding letter writing to the list? Maybe start by creating a Google doc or spreadsheet and circulate it among your friends, encouraging them to add their addresses. If it's shared among the group, maybe they'll write to each other, too.

Make it a ritual: one letter a month? See how that goes. Abandon rules. Encourage creativity. Use the letters for different purposes: to entertain, to inform, to delight, to plan; to carry on one side of a conversation with the deliberate intention of eliciting a response. If life gets overwhelming for either party, give each other permission to occasionally just send a greeting card or postcard...anything that's reasonable for the creator and won't cause the other party to feel you've "gone dark".

What's your relationship to letter writing? What are your feelings about them? Were you ever a writer of letters (and why did you stop), or does the idea terrify you (and why do you think so)?
My goal in 2025 is to write more letters, even if it turns out to be a solo mission. I hope that's not the case, however. I also hope you'll give it a try. Will you write? Address is in the comments.