"Take A Letter"? - NO! - Give A Letter!

I wrote a letter to my daughter the other day. Really. I mean pen and paper and envelope and stamp. I was almost surprised I remembered how to do it. It’s something I am trying to do more often. My first letter was one I enclosed with a little gift after she moved to New York City for a new job. I wanted to encourage her in the transition. I had to send the package anyway, and it was a little naked without a note of some kind.

Then I realized just how different a letter is from an email. Or a text. Or a phone call. Or anything else. So I did what any good American would do: I googled it. It turns out lots of people have come to the same realization that I did. Many of them much sooner and much more completely than me. Letter writing is special in many ways.

The U.S. Postal Service estimates that the average American home receives only one personal letter about every two months. This is obviously a far cry from 100 years ago, when the personal letter was the most common form of distant communication. But have we really advanced the art of communication with our free tools of instantaneous and abbreviated communication?

In his book, To the Letter: A Celebration of the Lost Art of Letter Writing, Simon Garfield writes,

For my children, with Facebook and smartphones, emailing is just too much trouble. In other words, our current ways may already be history. What if we find that our standard substitute for letter-writing is but a temporary and illusory bridge to not writing at all?

Let’s hope we can escape that depressing prophecy. Garfield goes on to describe the many, many benefits of a good, old-fashioned handwritten letter.

Catherine Field, in “The Fading Art of Letter Writing,” in the New York Times, said,

A good handwritten letter is a creative act, and not because it is a visual and tactile pleasure. It is a deliberate act of exposure, a form of vulnerability, because handwriting opens a window on the soul in a way that cyber communication can never do. You savor their arrival and later take care to place them in a box for safe keeping.

Next week, I’ll continue this case for letter writing.