Do Write Back Straight Away

 

   One of the topics at Thanksgiving was the lost art of letter writing. Once a commonplace necessity of communication, it is now wistfully recalled by those old enough to remember when it was abundant. It can certainly be argued that it had its time, and technology has usurped it, opening avenues of imparting dialogue and information to those we care about in ways that surpass the quaint, clunky method of writing something in our own hand on pieces of paper, folding them up, putting them in an envelope, paying for postage and mailing them off, only to take perhaps several days to reach their destination.

And yet...

My first memory of devoting time to writing a letter to someone was, I think, in the third grade. Our teacher broached the subject of pen pals with us, and we were given a person to correspond with. If memory serves correctly, the folks on the receiving end of our letters were our own age, and in another country. I remember writing a letter, though am not sure there was ever a response. It ended up being a fairly brief exercise overall, and I remember being more excited by the distance rather than the act of actually writing the letter (which, if I'm being honest, felt a bit tedious at the time).

A little over a decade letter, graduated from high school and sometimes venturing onto the nearby campus  to spend time hanging out in one of their all-night computer labs, it was already becoming more ordinary to communicate with people who were across the globe. It was much more immediate than my experience in grade school, and I was astonished by its realization. The system used for this form of conversation was IRC, and it allowed me to dialogue with folks in different time zones and different countries. A long-time Anglophile, I tended to gravitate toward users who were from England. Life got in the way, with college life and a part-time job not allowing for overnight visits to the computer lab, but it was fun while it lasted.

When Ashley & I were first together, and living in different cities, we would often correspond via e-mail. That's probably the closest I've come to modern day letter writing. And that's the issue -- the impetus for it was intense, positive emotion. I'm not sure there's more of a compelling reason for writing letters these days - either physical or virtual - thought perhaps I'm selling it short? Indeed, just a few years later, the introduction and adoption of cell phones and social media would eventually bring us to where we are today -- instant, back & forth communication with anyone, anytime, anywhere in the world, provided they have access to the technology. Again, why go through the process of writing a letter and mailing it off, when we've advanced so far?

The answer is, potentially, in the question.

While it's nice whenever anyone thinks of us enough to send a text, or DM via social media or an app, it's also true that the effort required for such communications is minimal, and so quotidian as to be unremarkable. In today's fast-paced world, for someone to actually take pen to paper, to sit down and write-out their thoughts to you in longhand, then purchase stamps and envelopes and put the letter in a mailbox, well, that is what constitutes a minor undertaking. It is an act that betrays effort behind the thought. We should probably have more of it, but it's understandable that we don't. Perhaps, in this year of quarantine and, for some, isolation, we could look to revive the art of letter writing, for old times' sake?