Our overly electronically connected society is losing touch with one of the oldest forms of communication—writing. Yes, I ‘write’ this blog, and I ‘write’ emails everyday and I ‘write’ tweets and Facebook posts. But something is lost when you confine yourself to a computer screen and Times New Roman.
I read an article about the lost art of letter writing which inspired this walk down memory lane. [Unfortunately, the link to that piece is not cooperating...]
One thing I missed the second I left high school were all the notes my friends and I wrote each other. During our boring classes we would write notes, pages long complete with artistic interpretations of our names and any other words that required extra emphasis (the crush- or enemy-of-the-week, for example). These notes were practically their own kind of works of art. Full of doodles with various colors of ink depending on our moods and lots of underlines and all caps. When the bell rang on those horribly boring classes, we would fold those notes in our own form of origami and slip them to the lucky recipient as we passed in the hall.
I miss holding those thoughts in my hand. A letter is something that you can hold and tells you, not just in the words, that someone took time to sit down and write their thoughts for your eyes only.
Emails are the same principle, essentially. The words, the thoughts, are all there. Even the time taken is there, but there is just a different feeling in being able to hold a piece of paper with actual handwriting on it. Writing letters can be a unique and interesting way to access the other person’s inner thoughts and I think I have some inner thoughts that I would like to put into hand written words.
The only actual pen pal I ever had was in third grade when my class was paired with a class at another elementary school. The only valuable letter writing relationship I ever really had were those notes that got me through high school.
Coincidently, I came across a quote about letters in the book I’m reading--Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand. The Major is doing his best to move on after losing his brother and strikes up a friendship with a local Pakistani shopkeeper. He does his best to keep up the traditions of his past in the midst of the modernization of his small British town and his own life.
In this excerpt, Major Pettigrew watches his new friend mail a very consequential letter and waxes nostalgic about “the impossibility of retrieving it from the iron mouth of the box; the inevitability of its steady progress through the postal system; the passing from bag to bag and postman to postman until a lone man in a van pulls up to the door and pushes a small pile through the letterbox.”
Letters are a commitment. They are real objects that you hold and save. Someone else also held it and sent it deliberately. There is a romance, the adventurous, antiquated, classic kind of romance, about a letter. In a letter, you see handwriting—an insight into the person who wrote. Investigators use handwriting analysis in profiling criminals. It can say, at the very least, how someone was feeling at the moment of writing. The experts know how to tell a lot more about the writers state of mind, but mood and emotion are enough for me.
I would love to have a pen pal with whom I could share that unique connection that comes from putting pen to paper and then sending those words on a journey to find that one person. As previously and frequently mention here, I am a big fan of writing and reading on actual paper. Being able to write my personal thoughts on paper for one person alone would be the embodiment of everything I love about writing and reading.