What emails make up for in speed, they lose in sensuality. Barry Boyce on the lost art of letter writing.
Every day when I come home from the office, I ritually check the mail table, which in spite of all our best efforts at organization, overflows with statements, catalogues, flyers, promotions, magazines, notices and pleadings. But nary a letter do I find.
For quite a few years after they stopped coming, I held out hope for a letter, but now at most we receive a note, and that only three or four times a year. If not completely dead, the personal letter is in its death throes.
Even my 89-year-old mother is on email. That’s impressive, I suppose, and it’s pretty neat to get an email from your mom (usually chiding me for not writing; the medium may change but not the message). But my mother has a beautiful script (or hand, as they used to say), and it was always a pleasure to receive a letter from her in her trademark blue ink on powder blue rag paper in the kind of smaller format that would ensure that even a short letter would go on for quite a few pages. She recently gave me some old letters written by my grandmother-in a scratchy hand on ultra-thin foolscap-and correspondence between my parents when my father worked far from home, and letters to and from my parents and various of my siblings, including some to and from Haight-Ashbury during the summer of love (“You’re not one of these hippies we see on Huntley and Brinkley, are you?”). They’re marvelous. Not only as a record of life, but also for their personality-they reek of it-and their elegance and grace.
That’s what email usually lacks. It’s a great invention, without a doubt, but email is a cold medium. The light is shining at you, not bathing the page. It’s stark and fast. A letter is slow and tactile. You can feel something of the person on the page. Emails engender unexpected responses so often because of the speed at which they are exchanged and the lack of personal touches that indicate tone and context. For some reason, these show up more in a letter. Perhaps we are all graphologists to a certain degree and can detect a person’s character in their script: the thickness or thinness of the line, how circular or how angular the curves, how high the ascenders and how low the descenders. Something of the personality comes through that does not in Courier, Times Roman, Helvetica or Verdana, attractive as they can be. The emoticons, such as :-), are a geeky attempt to send cues about tone and intent, but they are ham-handed at best, like someone jabbing you hard in the ribs and saying in a loud voice, “Ya know I’m only kidding, eh?”
Emails have also become an excuse to become tremendously careless. Paragraphs, periods, capitals at the beginning of sentences, spelling and sensible prose all seem at times to have gone by the wayside in the interest of rapid-fire communication. The requirement to think carefully and revise your work to make it clear, concise, correct and pleasing to the eye has been jettisoned in favor of getting the message out as quickly as possible.
It’s ironic that paragraphing, capitalization and punctuation are lacking in so many emails, since these devices were groundbreaking inventions that made prose much easier to follow. A number of early writing systems did not even have spaces between the words, and one line followed another, unbroken by any spacing or marking whatsoever. In our newest writing medium, then, we are actually regressing, losing advancements that made reading more pleasurable.
One of the key reasons to take care in paragraphing and punctuation and readability is that the writer should be the one to do the work, not the reader. The reader is not supposed to have to divine the meaning that lies behind the ramblings and jottings of the writer. It’s the writer’s job to turn off-the-top-of-the-head ramblings and jottings into communication. It’s simply more courteous to do the work for the reader rather than to ask the reader to do the work for you. This principle is under assault in the hot-mail age, where self-expression takes precedence over being understood.
In the good old world of the personal letter, the time and rhythm required to write were integral to the process, part of its pleasure. The fact that you really can’t write (legibly, at least) as fast as you can think is a natural governor on carelessness.
I recently bought some beautiful French stationery to go with a wonderful pen I have whose ink flows with the force of blood. I promised one of my friends who had moved away that I would write her a real, honest-to-god letter or two, even though both of us are computer-savvy. So far I have composed one missive which ran to four or five pages and that I composed over the course of a month or so-on an airplane, in a hotel room, at my desk-determined to keep my promise.
It was very nice to compose in this old-world way-not for publication or for personal creative expression or to take notes, but to recreate for someone else a bit of my experience. It was aesthetically pleasing to see fine ink married to fine paper (albeit not in the most striking of scripts).
A first letter invites a response and that response invites another, in a chain that develops into a correspondence, an ongoing conversation. Tremendous warmth and stimulation can be carried over great distances, demonstrating just how wonderful an invention writing truly is. These correspondences have been from travelers writing to those they love, vividly transporting the places visited, while also beckoning for news from home. It has been the link between companions separated by circumstances, like the soldier writing home from the wars or the itinerant who must leave home to seek a living elsewhere. It has been the vehicle for lengthy exposition and debate, point and counterpoint, like the letters exchanged between Jefferson and Adams. In earlier times, these would have been preserved in epistolaries, books of correspondence. An email thread is somehow not the same, tending as they do to the telegrammatic or the maddeningly prolix. (Let’s not even talk about flame wars, where no vile thought goes unexpressed.)
All in all, letter writing is an eminently simple pleasure, right up to and including sealing the letter, affixing the stamp and dropping it in the box, not knowing-as one would with email-how many nanoseconds will it take to reach your correspondent.
Snail mail, indeed. Let’s have more of it.
