Do the Write Thing
January 27, 2009, by Prudence Baird
“I can hardly remember the last time I received an actual letter let alone one I enjoyed as much as I did yours.”
So begins a recent email I received last week. The writer wasn’t responding to a holiday form letter I sent, but a personal letter written only to her, telling of events transpired and thoughts I’ve had since my move to Vermont.
I sat down at my desk one wintry afternoon and wrote while a gentle snow tucked the world outside my window under a sparkling blanket of white. An email would have taken half that time, but would have given a quarter of the pleasure—to both writer and recipient.
Email replaces letter writing as our principal means of both casual and formal communication; it is, after all, so terribly convenient. But in bowing down to expediency, we are losing the detailed records of individual lives that inform the future about today.
Our emails vanish when we do, when we change Internet servers and when we send our correspondence to desktop recycling bins. (Just ask the Bush administration, which handily deleted over a million emails over the past eight years.)
Unless we give our email servers permission to donate our correspondence to some kind of archival entity—much like people bequeath their bodies to science—no one will ever know what we have written. (No one may want to know, but that’s another subject.)
Without this kind of access to everyday Americans’ writings, future historians will be unable to pore over today’s letters to establish states of mind, gauge reactions to events of our day and keep history books honest.
Text messaging and IMing muddy the waters further. What would a historian do with sup qt j/w @ 2nite pza – cm l8r k? omg pos, we! aas, me ? Add in emoticons, those sickening bouncing smileys, and it’s enough to make historian David McCullough cry. On the other hand, can anyone who punctuates correspondence with faces made from semi-colons and parentheses have anything of lasting value to say?
But aren’t blogs like this one the modern-day equivalent of letters to our posterity?
In this weird, wired world, we forget how fragile electronically stored information is, subject to insults from both humans—in the form of totalitarian governments that can erase all traces of our existence—and natural disasters such as fires and power outages.
A hundred-year sunspot cycle is due any moment now, according to scientists. The last major sunspot storm in 1859 melted telegraph wires all over the United States. Our dependence on the electronic grid has mushroomed (somewhat!), so a bombardment of electromagnetic particles from our nearby star might melt transformers, cause blackouts and computer shutdowns for as many as 130 million Americans says a National Academy of Sciences Report.
And if that sunspot storm fails to materialize, there’s always the possibility that technology in 500 years will simply be unable to access today’s encrypted computer files.
Imagine if Shakespeare’s plays, converted to millions of i’s and o’s, were waiting for some Anglophile/nerd to figure out how to get the Bard’s lyrical words unembedded from silicon-coated plastic. How poor our world would be!
But perhaps the most important reason we ought to take the time to write—even if only the occasional letter written after an event of personal significance, such as our feelings about witnessing America’s first African American president being sworn into office—is that someday far in the future, our words will allow individuals we’ll never meet to experience our world, which will then be “the past.” Isn’t that amazing?
January 27th, 2009 at 9:59 am
Pru–how thoughtful and timely your beautfully written words are. Lee and I will soon be performing in “Love Letters”. AR Guerney’s moving love story told through letters wriiten between two people from childhood throughout their lives. Performing this play makes me wish I had a box of letters stashed away, so I could curl up on some rainy day, and immerse myself in memories. Have you read the letters of John and Abigail Adams? I can’t imagine a richer expression of love and longing. They’ll still be with us when the blog becomes passe’.
January 27th, 2009 at 11:16 am
Yes. It is amazing.
Nice.
January 27th, 2009 at 12:35 pm
Not to be snarky, but why did your friend send an email and not a hand-written letter herself I wonder? One good thing about email is that it at least has brought back writing as a form of expression and blogs have brought essay-writing and journaling into the forefront.
Like the smell and feel of a real newspaper, stationary and cards bring much tactile and emotional delight. I just hope we don’t lose any of the old as we bring in the new. Can’t it all coexist? With TV, movies and the Internet, we still have radio, after all.
January 27th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
You made me
(sorry… I just had to do that)
January 27th, 2009 at 1:18 pm
Beautifully expressed! As an author and writer of all kinds of things, including blogs, I, too, regret the passing of that quickly disappearing art of letter writing. I especially have a tough time with the E-Vite kind of Christmas/holiday cards I received. Even though I’m happy for the shout out in any form, somehow they don’t feel as special as the ones with an actual handwritten signature! I used to write thank you notes to people after having had a nice evening and dinner at their home. Now I send thank you emails, which is better than not sending anything, but I always feel a little guilty for not writing an actual card. The only problem with writing actual letters and notes though, is that I’m so used to using a keyboard that anything I write by hand comes out like chicken scratch and I have to keep starting over. Oh boy.
January 27th, 2009 at 8:59 pm
Write on! I’m going out and buying some expensive stationary.
P.S. I’ve been telling my daughter that there is no such thing as “private” on the internet…how do you “delete” one million e-mails????????????????????????
January 28th, 2009 at 9:11 am
Cathy,
You are so observant! I was hoping that one went under the radar!
Yes, it’s true. A lovely, hand-written letter CAN elicit an electronic response. And what we’re losing is the kind of back-and-forth that you (and historians) read in the John and Abigal Adams’correspondence that was written while he lingered alone in the White House and she held down the fort on their farm in Braintree, Massachusetts.
I don’t envy future historians…they’ll have their hands full trying to match up official documents, newspaper headlines and internet material, archived emails and hard copies of whatever letters exist…and MIA will be all IMs, text messages, BlackBerry and iPhone interactions. And if revisionists come in (through some kind of political upheaval) and rewrite history to suit their ideology, all bets are off as to whether those who live years from now will really know anything about us.
Well, as our last president might now say, “Not my problem! Heh-heh!”
Pru
January 28th, 2009 at 11:28 am
Pru,
I have been thinking about this most thought-provoking blog since yesterday. The excitement of receiving a hand-written envelope in the mail makes me giddy, and a wonderfully written letter would put me over the edge, probably make me dash to my computer and write an immediate thank-you. I could write and mail a letter, but that would take days to get to its destination.
There’s something about the immediate gratification to which we’ve grown so accustomed and the sense of urgency it provokes that makes me long for a sense of balance and renewed patience.
January 28th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
Wow… thanks Pru for the reminder that we are missing out in our hi-tech society when we quickly shoot off an email…
There is something so delicious about a hand written letter from a friend. I always loved as a child getting letters from my friend Maripat who moved 30 miles away when I was 8. I had my own stationery with my name on it & there was such excitment opening up a letter & recognizing the handwriting. The style of the handwriting that only belongs to that particular person.
I still feel that way …going through the morass of bills, and advertisments in my mailbox, my heart leaps to find a letter, with a stamp on the envelope, addressed to me. I quickly scan to see to who it is from and the excitment builds as I hold it in my hand. I always open it first.
It reflects that the person who wrote the letter also gets how sweet it is to send a personal, handwritten letter. The more I get emails, the more I desire getting a hand written letter on someone’s unique stationery, seeing more of them through their upper cases, lower cases & the width of their margins, the size of their letters.. all revealing a bit of that person.
Love letters through the email are missing the seductive, peronal quality of handling the handwritten letter.
I am hooked.
January 30th, 2009 at 1:37 pm
Prudence..it’s one of the things I’ve always loved, writing long letters to people I care about…I do less and less of it–it feels as if there isn’t the time anymore (I only like to write when I have ample time to gather my thoughts). Emails, which I do not love, not at all, seem like something you can fit in between lots of other tasks and running out the door. Not so satisfying, but something that takes up less space in the too-busy days we all have. I loved reading your thoughts, maybe you’ll re-inspire me…
February 1st, 2009 at 3:17 pm
Yes, Pru, the handwritten letter will be the definition of romance in the 21st century! I’m getting some fancy stationery and filling my Parker pen with beautiful blue ink.
February 3rd, 2009 at 12:54 pm
I have files (by person) of letters and cards. I have old family letters which should be in an archive somewhere and yet I cannot let them go being as they are the only connection I have to someone I never met. I love fingering the paper, smelling the place it was written, and touching the ink. I though I might be one of the last champions of letter writing AND Receiving. Now I know I am not alone. Thanks be.