“I wish it were socially impossible to write a letter,” wrote Edna St. Vincent Millay. “I wish there were no post office, no stamps, no facilities whatever for expediting the smug, intrusive, tedious letters that people write.”
St. Vincent Millay wrote this, of course, in a letter. Because back in 1900s, when you wanted to rant about letters, you needed a letter to do it.
For some, it was what was written that mattered. An expression from deep within. The heart made manifest in squiggles on a page. Philip Larkin wrote in a letter to his mother: “Do not worry about the past …. It can’t touch the future unless we let it. Every day comes to us like a newly cellophaned present, a chance for an entirely fresh start.”
For others, it wasn’t what was written. It was just the fact of the letter itself. My own letters to my mother were meant to be proof of my academic prowess. “Hi Mom, how are you? I’m fine. I studied all day in the library.”
My mom still has a stack of these college letters, neatly tied together with some pastel-colored acrylic yarn. At the end of every single one, there’s a postscript. In each case, it’s worded slightly differently, but the meaning is the same. Please send money. I never specified that it was for pitchers of beer in the rathskeller.
That was back when the sheer act of putting pen to paper made the time and space between you and the recipient feel great and small at once. They were there in your head when you put pen to paper. Writing college letters to my mother somehow made the 212 miles between us feel like 22,212 and two miles all at once.
Even as I look through the stack of letters decades later, I can imagine my mother reading them and knowing exactly what they were all about. They exist as a physical artifact of a time and place. They’re evidence of attention paid, of the fact that someone paused their day long enough to think about you. To miss you.
“If you do not want to write,” Tchaikovsky wrote in a letter to his nephew, “at least spit on a piece of paper, put it in an envelope and send it to me.”
When I was about 10, I had a pen pal in Scotland named Izzy. Those letters are long gone, but I can still recall the tissue-thin airmail paper. The surprise of seeing handwriting in the same language that nevertheless looked foreign to my own. The feel of the crispy envelope with its airmail stamp and the head of Queen Elizabeth. Even the ink looked like it came from a different kind of pen not available in America. I can’t remember a single sentence Izzy wrote, just the exact feel of holding her letters in my hands.
There were also the letters that changed you. A 10-year-old aspiring spy wrote to the espionage novelist John le Carre. Le Carre letter replied, “To be a spy, you need first to know what you think about the world, whom you would like to help, whom to frustrate …. You will be more than a spy then. You will be a good, happy man.”
In third grade, I wrote such a letter to the British author Roald Dahl after reading “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” I don’t remember what I wrote. Likely something about how much I loved the book and how desperately I wanted to be a writer myself.
His reply, however, is burned in my memory. “Dear Katie, Thank you for your letter. It gave me great pleasure.” Here was living proof that my dream of becoming an author would come true. This still feels like my most heartfelt validation even though years later, I discovered what he sent was a form letter he sent to every kid who wrote to him.
When I was about 8, my grandmother encouraged me to write a letter to her older sister, a published author who lived in Florida. My grandmother explained to me that great-aunt Alta was very old and nearly blind, which to me made her an ancient seer.
The letter must have meant a lot as I still have it in its original envelope. “You write very well for a little girl,” she wrote. “You can imagine things. Not everyone can, you know. Maybe when you’re a grownup, you’ll become a writer — who knows?” As far as I was concerned, the prophecy had been set in stone.
So what happens when the evidence of communication all but disappears?
It’s not just letters. There’s an Instagram challenge going around where parents place a rotary-dial phone in front of their kids. They write down a phone number and the kids have four minutes to figure out how to make a call. In the reel I watched recently, the kids were completely clueless. They couldn’t do it.
Every generation loses technologies. Answering machines, tape recorders, film cameras. What I wonder is what else we lose when there are no artifacts left behind.
Sure, not many of the letters I saved carried any great words of wisdom. Like many letters, some carried checks. Some carried encouragement. Some carried complaints. Most were ordinary even for the extraordinary among us. As Charles Darwin wrote in a letter to a friend, “I am very poorly today and very stupid and hate everybody and everything.”
But beneath all that, those letters carried the same message: I was here. And for a few moments, I was thinking about you.
Kate Sonnick is a writer and freelance creative director. Follow her on Substack @katesonnick. Or better yet, send a letter to 875 Iron Horse Drive, Suite A371, Park City, Utah 84060.