OK...so, I admit to a life lived in hopes of Jane Austen-esque scenes where the arrival of letters, and letter writing, become central to the day. Letters and regular correspondence are always at the heart of Austen's novels, in fact, Pride and Prejudice started out as an epistolary novel called First Impressions, consisting exclusively of letters between the characters. Letters, the writing, arrival, and reading and rereading of letters are central in every wonderful novel, not just Austen's, though Persuasion will always hold one of my most Kleenex driven scenes, Letters in literature reveal the characters and move the story forward-Wuthering Heights, The Color Purple, Little Women, most anything Dickens, Atonement...even Harry Potter. So how can we abandon letter writing! Yes, texting, email, and Twitter are the new post but ...can you tie them in a ribbon, place them in a box and revisit them when your heart needs to? And, what can you learn from a misspelled text decades from now?-I shudder to think.
"I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you..." F. W.~Captain Wentworth to Anne Elliot, Jane Austen's Persuasion
This is why Beverly Beckham's column In a world that’s gone virtual, a handwritten letter is magical- in The Boston Globe made me smile so. Handwritten letters and cards are magical! In fact, handwriting itself, not something clumsily punched on a keyboard, means something. Someone chose to sit, yes sit, and think-remember thinking, to let me know their thoughts, their news, their wishes, and even that they care.
I live my life gorilla glued to an email box. I think at last count I have 10 email addresses that actually get used every day! I truly get loopy hopping from one to the other, checking and emailing and deleting, and sometimes I forget which box I am in and why on earth I am there. A very strange life for someone who loves all things paper. Call me Wilma Flintstone but a lovely envelope, with a perfectly chosen stamp, holding even a line of Hello is a treasure.
Receiving a card or letter in your postal box is as Beverly Beckham said an "occasion-", always a treat - romantic and nostalgic in this day of three-letter texts. I still have the very first Birthday, Holiday, and Valentine cards I ever received, every letter written to me-well there may be a few I tossed for reasons we don't need to discuss, but I have letters and cards from so many who are no longer with me, and through those paper bound memories, they are here. When I need to visit with my grandmother I open a note or card she sent with her amazing penmanship that she maintained well into her nineties, She was appalled at mine, little did she imagine that soon handwriting would disappear all together-how is that a thing? There is comfort in my many many boxes of cards and notes and letters. It means that I will always have access to the memories, to their love in an envelope forever, can't get that with an email!
"Because you get a sense of a person by seeing their script, by the size and slant and steadiness of it. And because — and this is the most important reason we should not abandon penmanship — years later when the writer of that script is gone, when you stumble upon a card or a letter they sent, for a few magical seconds that person won’t be gone at all. She, he, they will be right beside you." ~Beverly Beckham
I cannot imagine a world without letters and cards, though I realize we are literally zooming our way to their extinction. Perhaps it is my love of the stories of real lives told through correspondence -Abigail and John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Eleanor Roosevelt, letters from the wars... How would we know of the lives they led, the emotions they experienced, the human beings they were without the intimacy of their letters? Many years ago I was given letters that my Dad wrote to friends during the war. As with most who fought in WWII my Dad didn't speak much about his experiences but these letters revealed the real fear that a very young man, in his late teens, was feeling as he faced the unknown days and months ahead. The remarkable thing about these letters is my Dad was not a letter writer or card sender. This Memorial Day weekend I look at those letters and think of all the letters written to families, friends, lovers... connecting lives, often the most mundane of daily moments-where the real living is, through the most tumultuous of times. I think about all the "kids" in the midst of horror who would read and reread letters that told of "not much new", about going to a movie or walking the dog, and how much those letters of "not much new" meant to them. Letters can bring devastating news of course, but they also bring joy, and like the ribbons that tie all my many years of cards and notes in those boxes, put a bow on our human connections...a text or an email cannot ever dream of creating that.
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