Reviving a Lost Art

According to statistics, there’s been a sharp decline in people reading books. But tell that to the 500 people on the library waiting list wanting to read Virginia Evans’ novel The Correspondent! My wife had the good fortune to score a copy and I am happily immersed in this unusual book whose story is told wholly through letters written and received by Sybil, the main character. It takes a while to figure out who’s who in her world, but if you’re patient, the larger picture slowly reveals itself like a jigsaw puzzle, one piece at a time. 

 

Being a library book, I can’t write in the margins, but there are many noteworthy passages that merit highlighting. One is an ode of sorts to the very notion of still writing handwritten letters, which none of us needs statistics to tell us, has just about wholly disappeared from our culture. Be honest. When was the last time you wrote one? When was the last time you received one?

And if we were equally honest, wouldn’t we all testify to the pleasure of writing by hand, perhaps seated at a table in low light with our drink of choice close at hand. Or under a tree listening to bird song and gazing out at Spring blossoms? Wouldn’t we admit that we equally treasured receiving such a letter, feeling the distant person’s presence both in the distinctive handwriting and their reflection so much deeper than an e-mail and certainly light years more profound than a text? 

 

Here's how Sybil describes it in a letter written to one Mick Watts, a man she met briefly who wonders why she writes so many letters:

 

“Imagine all that you have said to another, all the commentary you have exchanged with friends over drinks, over the phone with colleagues and distant relatives, all the prattle sent quickly, mindlessly over e-mail, messages typed into your cellular phone, and really, the sum of this interpersonal communication is the substance of your life, relationships being, as we know by now in our old ages, the meat of our lives; but all of that is gone. Vanished! And one day, Mr. Watts, you yourself will be gone. Perhaps if you have children, they will remember you’ if you have grandchildren, they, God allowing, may also retain a few fragments of memory including you, but their grandchildren will not. …what will be left of you, nearly erased, in fewer than three generations, and your life, the life you see from the inside, right now, as monumental, will be reduced to the blood in their veins and perhaps, if you are lucky, a distant namesake, a name plucked from the family tree that has come back in vogue after seventy-odd years as fashionable things tend to do and slapped on a newborn baby who will nothing of YOU. 

 

And yet, if one has committed oneself to the page, the tragedy I’ve just laid out will not apply. Imagine, the letters one has sent out into the world, the letters received back in turn, are like the pieces of a magnificent puzzle, or a better metaphor, if dated, the links of a long chain, and even if those links are never put back together, which they will certainly never be, even if they remain for the rest of time dispersed across the earth like the fragile blown seeds of a dying dandelion, isn’t there something wonderful in that, to think that a story of one’s life is preserved in some way, that this very letter may one day mean something even if it a very small thing, to someone?” (pp 45-46)

 

There’s some tasty food for thought. Don’t we all wish to make some kind of “Kilroy was here!” mark to tell the world, “We were here. We mattered. We meant something to somebody and we contributed in whatever small or big ways we could manage.” I’m sure this Blog is my love-letter to the world and I don’t really imagine anyone discovering it is going to read all 4, 875 posts (to date), but they’re there floating in cyberspace should anyone wish to see what I was up to just about any day in the past sixteen years. Then there are my handwritten journals, mostly a letter to my future selves and it is always interesting when I dip back in to visit one of my past selves captured on those pages. In my basement lies a trunk full of letters received and some I’ve written that people going through their basement have sent on to me. 

 

But it has been a long time since I’ve written a letter by hand or even a postcard. And I believe I’ve received one such letter in the past ten years or so. 

So in the midst of all my other writing—still the journals, this blog, articles, books—I’m determined to begin a ritual practice of writing letters to my daughters and grandchildren while my mind is still in one piece and my handwriting somewhat legible. Pick a day of the week for the grandchildren and another for my daughters and simply write to them. Of course, I would be delighted if any of them wrote back. Dialogues are always preferred to monologues, but I’m aware that it’s unlikely. We’ll see. 

 

And you? Can you imagine reviving the lost art of letter-writing? If so, write me a letter and tell me about it.