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 precise figure exists, it is hard to tell exactly, but we have a hunch that over the years writing and sending letters to friends has declined significantly and is declining significantly.
Even though we email and WhatsApp, and chat and text, we’re simply not writing long-form letters penned with ink to each other anymore. The letters that can be delivered to a mailbox via the hands of a real human-being. And forget stationery, or stamped envelopes—the stamps picked out for their beauty and for the interest of our friend.
If we were to graph this over the years, to make it visible, the dot of peak letter writing would start in the upper left-hand corner of the y-axis on a graph. From there our graphed dots would slope downward. (We wouldn’t want the price of a share of stock to trend the way our letters are trending on a graph like that.)
While no exact figure exists, Post Office data seems to reinforce our hunches about all of this.
Consider this Post Office analysis of the mail: “…Volume of First-Class Mail, which includes letters, postcards, and large envelopes, fell 50 percent between FYs (fiscal years) 2008 and 2023, from 92 billion pieces to 46 billion.”
Letters, postcards, and large envelopes all declining.
Epistolary communication flickering out of sight.
And so we enter Letter Writing into The Last Catalog.
The cost? We’ll lose not only the medium, as we lose letter writing, but our connection with each other, somehow. There seems to have been some value to the practice of writing letters as it relates to our connections and friendship, even.
When we stop using paper, pen, postcards and stamps, we set aside time to thoughtfully (See catalog entry: Thought) craft words, or to craft our connections with others (See catalog entry: Us).
In her essay, The Letter is Dead: Long Live The Letter, Maria Popova quotes Simon Garfield, author of To the Letter: A Celebration of the Lost Art of Letter Writing, who writes that:
“Letters have the power to grant us a larger life. They reveal motivation and deepen understanding. They are evidential. They change lives, and they rewire history. The world once used to run upon their transmission — the lubricant of human interaction and the freefall of ideas, the silent conduit of the worthy and the incidental, the time we were coming for dinner, the account of our marvelous day, the weightiest joys and sorrows of love. It must have seemed impossible that their worth would ever be taken for granted or swept aside. A world without letters would surely be a world without oxygen.”
To reinforce this sentiment about a letter’s value, in a blog about the dying art form of letters, another author quotes Mary Robinettte Kowal, founder of the annual ‘Month of Letters’ project, who says:
“‘Unlike an email, a letter is a ticket to the unknown, an insight into someone else’s consciousness, at a time when, of all things, they were thinking of you.’”
So the cost? Perhaps this: the brief, luminous certainty that a loved one has turned their thoughts and attention fully toward us (if even for a few moments.)
Ps.
Lord Byron (who some say was the greatest letter writer in English literature) sums up a letter’s value in this statement: “Letter writing is the only device combining solitude with good company.”
Pps.
The good company of a friend?
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 gives 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. 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. Letters are just a great way for good friends to maintain a discussion about ideas or beliefs or thoughts together.
Ppps.
The correspondence of famous pen pals from history also bears witness to the unique connections that letter writing can create. Consider: 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.
Other specifications:
Pen. Ink. Paper. Or pencil. Time. An envelope. (And a stamp picked out for its beauty and for the friend.)