When I tell people that my friends and I maintain a written correspondence, I often receive the same reactions. People remark on it as a delightfully quaint pastime, as though we keep up the practice simply because of a penchant for pretty parchment and quill pens. To be fair, I do enjoy dressing up letters with beautiful stationery and wax seals, but I can do without when necessity demands it. The medium of letter writing opens a channel of communication with someone that digital messaging can’t replicate.
Canadian communications theorist Marshall McCluhan was famous for saying, “The medium is the message.” How a thing is said communicates just as much as—if not more than—what is said. We often view the various modes of communication (letters, emails, and texts) as interchangeable, accomplishing the same end with varying levels of efficiency. Communication seems to trace a line of evolution from letter, telegram, email, and finally to text, each step a sign to signifying that we may now discard earlier, outdated forms.
In truth, these means don’t accomplish the same end. No one writes a letter as they would a text, and although an email may bear a greater resemblance to a letter, even that doesn’t communicate the same message. In fact, a person writes a letter far differently from how he or she would speak even in regular conversation.
The act of writing encourages a certain confidentiality. It requires the development and expression of thoughts that often seem unnatural in conversation. It provides a unique stage for these expressions, produced in solitude and facing belated scrutiny.
The sad fact of the matter is that the ability to write a letter requires dedication and intentionality, which we seem to possess less and less today. Texting seems far more suited to our shortened attention span and allows us to skirt the delayed gratification of a letter.
It’s easy to despair at the state of language today, and it’s easy to see that the “what” of what we say is quickly declining. Studies have shown that the vocabulary of average Americans has been decreasing since the 1970s. However, we should also take note of the decline in how things are said. Letter writing, as much as it may be a lost art, is an antidote to the decline of modern communication.
Beautiful Letters
The letters of John Keats are some of the most beautiful letters written in the English language. In 1818, the young English poet met Fanny Brawne, and shortly thereafter, the two fell in love. Their romance was tragically cut short when Keats died of tuberculosis in 1821 at the age of 25, but many of his letters to Fanny were preserved and were eventually published.
Another of his letters from 1819 reads: “You must write to me as I will every week for your letters keep me alive. My sweet Girl I cannot speak my love for you.”
Adult Friendships
In a correspondence spanning 20 years, the letters contained in 84 Charing Cross Road reveal the burgeoning friendship between Helene Hanff and Frank Doel. Their friendship lived and flourished exclusively on the page. Their correspondence began with Helene’s first letter to the English bookshop Marks & Co. to request certain titles unavailable to her in the states. The pages sent between the English bookseller and the American writer are lined with sparkling humor and a generosity that crossed ocean and culture.What makes the correspondence so remarkable and heart-wrenching is that, as a reader so far removed in time and space from both parties involved, one can see the precise moments in which a professional acquaintance is crystallized into a friendship. I never thought a line such as this would be so greatly affecting: “Dear Helene (you see I don’t care about the files anymore).”
One of my personal favorites from the letters is from Helene in 1952 and reads, “So Elizabeth will have to ascend the throne without me, teeth are all I’m going to see crowned for the next couple of years.”
Advice to the Young
In 1903, a young poet wrote to Rainer Maria Rilke for advice on writing poetry, but the subsequent letters Franz Xaver Kappus received contain advice not only on poetry but also on living well.In a letter from 1904, Rilke wrote, “It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: That is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.”
In a 1903 letter, he wrote: “You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
Unspooling the Self
So much of letter writing involves a language of intentionality. As Australian writer and musician Edwina Preston so aptly observed, letters let the real world in by allowing interruptions.“They were provisional, real-time, patched-together accounts of life as we lived it, as it occurred, on the spot. An unspooling of self onto the page in real time,” she said.
Even the seemingly insignificant moments that seep into our consciousness in the background of the act of writing often find their way onto the page. Because the act of writing itself takes time and thoughtfulness, it allows the “stuff of life” to be present.
Although letters can serve as a chronicle of our days, a letter is not merely a bland recitation of a day’s events as one would make in a journal. The account takes into consideration its eventual audience and is “an ongoing, unfinished conversation—a letter invokes a relationship, so it needs to be sensitive to the reader in ways a diary need not,” as Ms. Preston said. It therefore takes into consideration the delight given to the recipient.
So many decisions go into the process of writing a letter that the medium communicates much more than just the words. The sender’s choices regarding the type of paper, using ink or pencil, writing in a wild scrawl or careful script, and the treatment of mistakes or rewordings give a fuller message. In each of these choices, as well as in deciding which events deserve such permanent preservation, we read the character of our correspondent.
What makes the receipt of a letter so significant to us is that all of these decisions are made with the other person in mind. This tangible expression of the regard one person has for another is something meant to be cherished and returned to in a way that digital communication is not.
Ms. Preston noted that delayed gratification is natural to letter writing. Delay is negatively construed in emails and texts, which exist for the sake of instant, even continuous, communication. With the exception of a teenage girl waiting for her crush to text her back, waiting for a text hardly ever makes the receipt of it sweeter, whereas the anticipation of a letter can add to the delight of receiving it.
On the day of the wedding of a dear friend, the groom had someone deliver a letter to the bride as she was waiting for the wedding service to begin. He had written it just after their first date some years before. After expressing his worry about her thoughts of him, Philip turned from fear to a simple trust and hope that found its reward the day his bride would read the letter.
Now was the perfect time to deliver it. The words had been long in coming, but they were well worth the wait; in fact, the passage of the years made them more beautiful.
