Long Live Letterwriting (Letterwriting Is Dead)

Dear friends:

It has occurred to me that the art of letter-writing seems to be, if not dead, then in a persistent vegetative state, unlikely to be revived during our lifetimes. This reflection, I admit, causes me some sorrow, though I am at least in part complicit in the casualty, having resorted to brief and largely unsatisfactory email messages to maintain contact with friends and loved ones in recent years.

During my youth, I exchanged countless letters with friends whom I met at various summer camps. In college, I had a lively correspondence with my dearest friend from high school. In a way, I was a lonely adolescent, and these friendships, nurtured and maintained through correspondence, provided a companionship that I did not have with many other young people within physical proximity. Through letters, I connected in a way that I could not through personal contact.

As any letter-writer knows, writing letters is a time-consuming task. Not only must one take the time to put pen to paper, which takes more time than typing (I am taking the easy way out at this moment, I regretfully confess), but one must also have SOMETHING TO SAY. Letters must be composed or risk being boring. They must be chatty and convey news, not a simple “how are you?” otherwise why waste the postage. But I eagerly put pen to paper as a child and teenager, mailed my letters, and awaited a response from my friends. I attempted, in a way that I do not with email, to infuse each letter with a sense of fun. I felt the duty to entertain my friends or at least to convey something REAL about my life at the time, to share rather than to “check in.”

Over time, my number of correspondents dropped from many to a few. One day, I simply did not receive a response, or, more rarely, I confess, I did not write back, feeling the pull of other more pressing demands on my time. I often wonder whether, if I had met those same friends in the age of email, the number of friendships retained through email correspondence would have been greater or fewer, richer or poorer for the medium. For, while the numbers of friends with whom I wrote on a regular basis dwindled, the quality of the friendships strengthened.

One is still a dear friend to this day, though our lives have taken us in different directions. We keep in touch through email, but I admit that something does seem to be missing, something that was present in all those letters. The loss of another friend – not to anything tragic mind you, but simply to a lack of time to maintain our correspondence once we entered college – still saddens me all these years later. We touched based a couple of times in our adulthood – I found her online and connected through email – but the correspondence has been brief, and, again, lacked some quality of our early confidentiality on paper.

And those letters remain, wrapped in ribbon, stored in a box in the closet of my office. As I have gotten older, I have let go of much of the detritus of my childhood and teenage years, but these, these lovely reminders of a bygone time, I cannot bear to release. What is it about letters that satisfies some deep need that electronic correspondence cannot seem to appease?