.lost art.

epis·to·lary [\i-pis-tə-ler-ē, e-pi-stȯ-lə-rē\], adjective,  1: of, relating to, or suitable to a letter;2: contained in or carried on by letters; 3 : written in the form of a series of letters

Maybe it’s the fact that I am finally reading – loving – lost in A.S. Byatt’s phenomenal Possession: A Romance.  Maybe it’s that every day I barrel head first, sans helmet, into the when-I-was-your-age/I-remember-when-a-slice-cost-a-dollar/get-off-my-law/grumble-grumble-grumble territory. Maybe it’s the daily, dreary delivery of bills, catalogues, credit card offers, political pamphlets and other boring forms of tree-killers. But –

I miss letters. I miss sending and receiving them. I miss the lost art of telling  and being told a life story in truncated chapters lasting weeks, months, years.

Before my introduction to these newfangled things called “electronic mail,” “text messaging,” and “Facebook,” – before real life took over with its long commutes to and fro work, its travel schedules, its plop-down-with-exhaustion end to the days – I was a dedicated letter writer. Even at a young age, I had the kind of life that lent itself to making friends across towns, states and countries.

The first letters I remember sending were to elementary school friends whose families had moved from the Lower East Side of Manhattan to the outer reaches of Queens and Brooklyn – distances that at that time seemed as far away as the moon. When I left for boarding school in the 9^th grade, letters home to friends that I’d known since the second grade were the only way to keep myself threaded to my old life while adjusting to such a disorienting, straight-outta-the-movies place. (Public phones were limited, and my penny-pinching dad kept a tight rein over my use of my calling card.) In the summers, the pattern would reverse and would exchange letters with my boarding school friends up until the very week school started up again. I was always collecting epistolary partners wherever I went - friends I met during my junior year abroad in France, family members to whom I had become newly close, people I’d met in academic programs, etc. etc. I seem to recall once finding a pen pal in an exotic location like Arizona or New Mexico through the pages of Bop! magazine. Oh yeah, I’m old.

Not only did I love exchanging letters - I was good at it. (I think. I hope. May God smite me down if I am wrong.) I would write out several drafts of my letter (mistakes and cross-outs being as anathema to me as wearing gold and silver jewelry at the same time), and decorate them with drawings, magazine collages, cut-outs, you name it. I wanted the recipients of my letters to smile when they opened them, to see in the aesthetic detail how much I cared about them. I never minded if their letters to me were not as elaborate – it was enough to receive a response, the thrill of seeing a letter in the mailbox – to me, to me, yay yay yay a letter to me! I would rush, excitedly, to tear open the envelope, sometimes causing grievous injury to the letter itself. I’d curl up to read the letter several times over, even as I was already planning my response.  I would file them away in my lowest dresser drawer, only to find them years later – individual pulp and ink time capsules of my past.

Modern forms of communication – email, instant messaging, Twitter and their ilk – are surely convenient, but they do tend to lend themselves to brief expressions of reaction and inquiry, rather than the conscious expression of feeling, the concentration required to put thought to virgin paper. Emails and the like can be breeding grounds for lazy, misspelt writing, not to mention misinterpretation and tonal deafness. They are usually placeholders for anticipated face-to-face interactions (“…So, are we on for this weekend, or what?”), rather than the embodiment of a relationship that can go on for months and years without requiring physical exchanges. It is too easy, for me at least, to lose track of emails and forget to answer them; but letters, by their very presence and the effort required to write and send them, were unflinching in their demand for a response.

It’s true that email and the like allow us to keep in touch with more friends than would normally be possible. How else would I know what my pediatrician friend La Doctora was up to if not for emails and text messages? Because in case you didn’t know, saving babies’ lives on a daily basis doesn’t leave much time for letter-writing. Other important, my-life-wouldn’t-be-the-same-without-them friends live in California, Texas, Spain, and a multitude of other far-away-zones. Email and Facebook allow us to keep in almost constant touch while we further our careers, mother our babies, and waste too much time thinking about the status of Jennifer Aniston’s love life. The usual ruptures between life phases – high school to college, college to adulthood, singledom to marriage, marriage to kids, career to career – are smoothed over, allowing us to carry into our futures those parts of our past that matter the most.

But still – wouldn’t it be nice to sometimes open your mailbox to find an envelope where your name and address were handwritten, posted with a million crazy stamps from foreign countries? To years later have tangible proof of your communication with people who meant a lot to you? To receive letters like the one "Lewis Caroll" sent to May Mileham on 6 September 1885?

 

Dearest May,

Thank you very much indeed for the peaches. They were delicious. Eating one was almost as nice as kissing you: of course not quite: I think, if I had to give the exact measurement, I should say ‘three-quarters as nice.’ We are having such a lovely time here; and the sands are beautiful. I only wish I would someday com across you, washing your pocket-handkerchief in a pool among the rocks! But I wander on the beach, and look for you, in vain, and then I say, ‘Where is May?’ And the stupid boatmen reply, ‘It isn’t May, sir! It’s September! But it doesn’t comfort me.

Always your loving,

C.L.D.

 

© Chommo, 2009