Consider the plain fact of a letter: a sheet of paper, a little ink, and the better part of an hour given over to one person and no other. There is nothing modern about it, and that is rather the point. In an age that prizes speed above nearly every other virtue, the written letter stands as a quiet dissenter, insisting that some things are worth the doing slowly.
We send more words now than any people who ever lived, and mean less by them. A message flies from the thumb before the thought behind it has fully formed; it is read in the same haste, answered in kind, and forgotten by evening. This is not correspondence. It is a kind of chatter conducted at a distance, serviceable for arranging the hour of a supper but poorly suited to the deeper offices that words have always been asked to perform.
The Discipline of Sitting Down
A letter begins with a small surrender. One must sit, and be still, and give up for a while the pleasant illusion that one is attending to several things at once. The blank sheet does not permit the divided attention that the glowing screen invites. It asks for a beginning, a middle, and an end, and it will not compose them on your behalf.
From this discipline comes the letter's peculiar honesty. Because it cannot be dashed off, it obliges the writer to know his own mind before he sets it down. He must decide what he truly wishes to say to his mother, to his old friend, to his son far from home, and he must find the words that say it and no less. The labor is real, and it is precisely the labor that makes the finished letter a gift. To write to another at length is to spend upon him the one commodity that none of us can make any more of, which is time.
Ink, Paper, and the Long Memory
There is, too, the matter of permanence. The instant message is written upon water. It vanishes into a stream of its fellows and is gone, and no descendant will ever hold it in the hand or feel in it the pressure of the writer. A letter endures. It can be folded into a book, tied with a ribbon, laid away in a drawer, and found again by a grandchild who never knew the one who wrote it, and who learns, from the very slant of the hand, something no record could tell him.
Our national life is bound up with such papers. The Republic was in no small part argued into being by correspondence, its founders reasoning with one another across the distances of a young and roadless country by the only means they had. American families have carried their history in bundles of letters: the son writing home from a far camp, the settler describing a new country to those left behind, the sweethearts keeping faith across the miles. These are the documents by which a people remembers itself in the particular, one hand and one heart at a time. Little of what we now transmit will survive to be so cherished.
Taking Up the Pen Again
The remedy is neither difficult nor dear. It wants a few sheets of decent paper, a pen that pleases the hand, and the resolve to sit down once in a while and write. Begin with someone who would be glad to hear from you: a grandparent, a friend grown distant, a child away at school. Say the thing the hurried message never has room to say. Do not labor to be eloquent; labor only to be present, and to let the reader feel that for a quarter of an hour he had your whole attention.
The letter you send will very likely be kept. It may be read more than once, and read again years hence, when the writer and the day are far away. That is a great deal to purchase with a sheet of paper and a little care. In a world grown loud with instant dispatch, the composed letter remains what it has always been: a considered act of attention, offered by one person to another, and outliving them both.