Letter Writing
Item No. 13
“Of course friendship isn’t all about letters, that is just one way to maintain a discussion about ideas or beliefs or thoughts together.”As no exact figure exists, it is hard to tell exactly, but we have a hunch that over the years writing letters to friends has declined significantly and is declining significantly. That perhaps a large, negative percentage change is happening right in front of us. If there were a graph of letter writing over time, the dot of peak letter writing would start in the upper left-hand corner and decline, and decline, and decline significantly all the way from the y-axis pinnacle grounding low to the x-axis in the lower right-hand corner. The rock bottom place it would land currently. And it's probably still declining. Especially letters penned with ink. On stationery. And stamped with colorful stamps, picked out for their beauty and for the interest of the friend. Of course, we also know that letter-writing habits vary between individuals and generations. It isn’t possible to really account for letter writing completely. It lands here in the catalog this season, as there seems to have been some value to the practice of it. Such famous pen pals throughout history remind us of its value and stand as a testament to the value to be found in the practice: Catherine the Great and Voltaire, the Russian empress and the French philosopher; Groucho Marx and T. S. Eliot: the comedian and the poet; J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: discussing their Christian beliefs together; Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln: exchanging letters at the end of the Civil War; Carey Mulligan and Marcus Mumford: writing love letters to each other while he was on tour; and Tony Danza and Tupac Shakur: writing about responsibility and being a role model.
The cost? Connection with each other. C.S. Lewis, writer, scholar and lay theologian, says of friendship, “I have no duty to be anyone’s Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (For God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.” He says when we meet someone that can be our friend, we experience the rare beauty of noticing that a friend appreciates something in the same way we do. “What, you too? I thought that no one but myself...” We instinctively say as our heart swells inside, knowing that another being sees something in this experience of life in the same way we happen to, in a way that we can relate to. By the way, essayist, Anaïs Nin, in The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934, says something quite similar; “Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.” Of course friendship isn’t all about letters, that is just one way to maintain a discussion about ideas or beliefs or thoughts together. Or as Lord Byron apparently said about the practice of letter writing, “Letter writing is the only device combining solitude with good company.” But seeing that there is a crisis of loneliness might mean that indeed one of the costs of not receiving a letter from a friend, can be the loss of a spiritual connection that helps to prevent the sadness that might accompany loneliness.
Other specifications:
Pen. Ink. Paper. Or pencil. Time. An envelope. (And a stamp picked out for its beauty and for the friend.)