By John Ramsey Miller
http://www.johnramseymiller.com
I have a letter I keep in a lock box that my mother wrote to me thirty years ago just after she discovered that her breast cancer had returned in a big way. That letter arrived in the brand new lock box a few days after she died, handed to me by my father. In the letter she tells me how wonderful her life was and no regrets, and how much she loved me, and how everybody needs a lock box for important papers so here’s one I bought for you. That letter is still in that lock box under my bed––a prized possession. I like to read it. My mother’s penmanship was flawless. My own is quite good thanks to public schools in Mississippi and a lot of practicing over the years.
Thirty years ago people still wrote letters, but as long distance calls grew less expensive, it became easier to call and talk than to write a letter. With cell phones we are always near enough to a cell tower to talk whenever we feel like it. With the Internet, people send electronic messages. I get e-mails from friends almost every day, and I almost never print them out. Mostly the communications are short blurbs, and messaging on the cell phone means even briefer information passing. Twitter is dumbing down America faster than evolution. I text with my wife because she is at her desk and she can check every once in a while to see if I’ve said anything worth responding to. She texts me because it doesn’t interrupt my writing time.
Back when we all wrote letters, we put a week’s or a month’s worth of news in the letter. We wrote our feelings and what life was doing to us. You’d sit with a pen imagining the person we were writing to and thinking about that person who’d be reading it. The mail came, you opened a letter, you unfolded it and you read the letter in your hand. The paper had been in the hands of the person who’d written it. You could fold it up and open it again later, as often as you wanted to for as long as the paper held up. Think of the archives filled with personal letters from the famous and not so famous. I think of Ken Burns’ Civil War series for PBS and what it would have been without the personal letters from the time that gave it texture and meaning and humanized the war. We are losing history. The e-mails are being deleted almost as fast as they are read, which probably goes to what they are worth. We don’t compose e-mails the same way we did letters. I officially name it “jit-jotting.”
Recently I sent my step-mother a letter. She is in an assisted living facility in Dallas, and I love her dearly. Her daughter told me that she reads that letter over and over again. That letter connects us in a way no telephone or e-mail on a screen can. After my father passed away my brother went through his papers and he gave me several letters I’d written to him over the years, along with pictures I’d sent in the envelopes. I could tell he’d read them over and over, and I found myself wishing I’d written him more of them.
My dead mother is somehow still alive in that letter. The letter from my mother, only matters to me now––the living half of the communiqué. I suppose after I’m gone my children will dispose of it, and that’s okay with me since nobody else will feel the connection or its importance.
I think of the books written from the collected letters between people, mostly famous, and I wonder how many will be written in the future from the collected e-mails or telephone conversations of famous people. There is a style in written letters that aren’t reflected in most e-mails and lost forever with telephone calls.
Maybe part of the reason we write books is to leave something of ourselves behind. We are all jit-jotting our way through our days and our lives, and are leaving a thinner and thinner trail as we go into the future––and it seems to me to be a bleaker place in most respects.
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John, I have a collection of my mother’s letters, too. Like yours, she had wonderful penmanship. Mine, on the other hand, has degraded into a cryptic mess that even I have trouble reading (one of the reasons I hate book signings since I can neither write nor spell well). I can no longer write in cursive and must print anything I write with a pen and paper. The computer has become a godsend for me, especially with spell check. But you’re right, the effort that goes into the quality of our personal communications decreases in proportion to the additional methods of communication. The ancient Egyptians spent years carving out a story on a stone wall. Today, the same story would be restricted to 140 characters on Twitter and would take 10 seconds to finish.
I agree with you that as authors, one of the reasons we write books is to leave something of ourselves behind. Whether our books are literary or genre, a piece of each one of us is encoded between the lines.
Not only do people not write letters much anymore, but they don’t even write. In fact, schools barely teach penmanship any more, and I fear that one day cursive writing will be a thing of the past. But how will one sign checks or contracts?
Greeting cards have done a lot to lessen the need to come up with clear, interesting or evocative prose, sadly. You can find a card to fit nearly every situation, so why bother taxing your own brain? Hallmark will do it for you, and with a cool/pretty/hilarious picture/photo/drawing to go with it.
In the early days of the Internet, I had serious and fascinating–and LONG–conversations with other women all over the world, including some that I so wish I still had access to. Back then I was on AOL, and their email program was embedded into their software. Every time their software got upgraded I lost emails from my database. It still makes me sad. Some got printed, but the majority, and some of the best ones, were lost forever.
By the way, I’ve been enjoying your blog immensely. Thank you for sharing your collective knowledge and wisdom.
I keep letters and important papers in a wonderful hand-made, green-painted metal box. The box originally belonged to an ancestor of mine, who made it in his factory, a few years before the assembly-line method of manufacturing drove him out of business (he never adapted). Both the box and the few letters that come my way these days are special, but I do wonder what future historians will collect about the Very Important People of the future. Will they have to dig through computer files and recreate Tweets, for example? Will there be Tweet displays in the Smithsonian? Yikes.
I have a box of the letters my grandfather send my grandmother in WWI, and my father sent my mother in WWII.
Here’s an oddity. A week ago I received not one, but two, handwritten letters from young readers, who sought writing advice. It’s so rare these days to get just one. So I wrote them back, but typed the letters. No matter how I’ve tried, my penmanship is awful. I envy John for that.
And oh how sad it is to compare the letters of UNSCHOOLED Civil War youths with even the essays of most college seniors.
Do you think it’s possible that we, the denizens of a computer age, who have witnessed the greatest amount of progress in human history, are just overwhelmed by it all? That the idea of saving things for posterity is just too much for us to comprehend, in light of all the history that is made every single day? And every bit of that history in the making is available to us, one way or the other, immediately, so it simply does not have the value it once did, it seems.
Compare our lives today to 200, even 100 years ago, when ships carrying letters and news from the other side of the world might take six months to arrive, assuming they didn’t sink somewhere along the way. Today, with our instantaneous communications, it’s simply not as important to us to be as eloquent, or even as voluble, it seems.
It’s sad, but it’s also exciting. Some might say too exciting.
Our great great grandkids will probably only communicate like cave men… Grunts, groans, belches, and growls…
I so totally agree – letters that have been in the family for decades are precious historical resources and give a unique insight into people’s lives. I only wish we could bring back the power of the handwritten letter – I hope so for posterity’s sake.
When I was away in the Marines just before getting married I wrote letters to my future wife almost every day. Twenty-two years later, she still has all of them. Over the course of our marriage I would often write poems to her via email. Those she remembered to print out we still have, most though got deleted when the computers crashed or were updated.
Letters are an historical means of preserving information without which, we will have no history. If our society isn’t careful we could go the way of pre-Celtic Ireland. They obviously communicated in some meaningful way to have built Newgrange, the Megaliths, and Mound cities, but since they left no trace of systematic writing we will never really know what happened there.