After reading Letters of Note, Brian Shea discusses the power and depth of the lost art of handwritten letters
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In this era of digitized communication, there are few people left who write letters by hand. Common Core standards call for teaching penmanship in kindergarten and first grade only, after that email or texting are all that remain of stationary and ink. Such antiquities take time in a rushed world, a world in which we have mistaken being busy for being productive. One wonders what future archaeologists will think of us when reading our correspondence.
When the Amazon box recently arrived at my house, it took me a little while to actually open it. I am busy, after all. But the blur of modern life is precisely what led me to order Letters of Note: An Eclectic Collection of Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience, recently compiled by UK based Shaun Usher, owner of the popular blog “Letters of Note.”
The book is a collection of letters dating back centuries. When I first examined the ink scratched on yellowed stationary, I hoped to absorb some last echo of eras long past. But as I made my way through the moving letters Usher chose to include, I found myself returning to the present with each one. The overwhelming social and technological changes since these letters were penned encourage us to think we live in exclusive times. That is, that we command a place in history that makes us superior to all who came before. But the souls who left their voices behind in Letters of Note make the present both startlingly common and extremely hopeful.
It’s easy to forget the commitment that writing and even reading a letter required. The recipient had nothing but the imagination and carefully chosen words to invoke the scenes and emotions described on the page. There was no Youtube to supply ready-made images. Letters crossed the world on ships, horses, and trains to reach their destinations. That made them an anticipated event, heightening their rarity and value. People kept them because they were a permanent expression of important and intimate relationships.
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Not all the news that arrived in the mail was pleasant to read. Mental illness runs through several of the letters, its victims calling for help during times when such ailments were interpreted as weakness or not recognized as illness at all. In a 1941 letter, Virginia Wolf writes to her husband that she
“can’t fight any longer…I don’t think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness.”
By the time her husband found this letter on their mantle, his wife had loaded stones into her pockets and plunged to her death in a local river.
The most striking letter does not resemble script at all. When one opens Letters of Note to page 108, dark columns cover the page in what looks like a charcoal drawing of a rainstorm. But when you squint, lowering your face to the paper, you realize the writer’s call for help consisted of hundreds upon hundreds of words piled upon each other and so small they can barely be distinguished. In 1909 a 30-year old mother had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Heidelberg, Germany suffering from dementia praecox; now known as schizophrenia. Alone and scared, she spoke endlessly of family and filled page after page with only two words: “Herzensschatzi komm,”meaning “sweetheart, come,”in her native German. Others simply said, “komm, komm,”over and over—“come, come,”a plea to her now absent husband to be with her. Her letters were found only after she died alone 11 years later.
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I speak for many when I say that one of the ugliest hallmarks of 2014 is our indulgence in viral humiliation. Our media relishes in every slur or mistake caught on a cellphone camera. My disgust is not with celebrities and politicians whose flaws we have fetishized, but those of us who indulge in watching them in an endless loop like rats waiting under a bird’s nest for the latest fall from grace.
Charles Dickens felt the same way in 1849, it would seem, and expressed his disgust to The Times in a letter calling for an end to public executions. He was attending the public hanging of two notorious murders in London but before long, lost all interest in the condemned. The crowd that gathered to watch became the new object of his horror, devolving to an almost animal state as it waited for the hangman. Drunken crowds sung songs, brawled, and howled in anticipation. Police pulled women from the crowds, dresses torn.
“When the sun rose brightly,”Dickens recalled, “it gilded thousands upon thousands of upturned faces, so inexpressibly odious in their brutal mirth or callousness, that a man had cause to feel ashamed at the shape he wore, and to shrink from himself, as fashioned in the image of the Devil.”
Dickens called for an end to public hangings not from pity for the guilty, but in fear of what we all become from such spectacle. Public hangings were discontinued in England in 1868.
With viral disgrace come viral apologies in 2014, but Letters of Note teaches us that we did not invent those either. Whenever I see ancient Chinese characters gracing an old piece of parchment, I assume it displays profound poetry or Confucian truisms. But the letter on page 254 is in fact a form letter for use by local Chinese officials in the year A.D. 856 to apologize for their drunken behavior the night before. Apparently, it became such a regular problem that a form letter was required.
“Yesterday, having drunk too much, I was intoxicated as to pass all bounds; but none of the rude and coarse language I used was uttered in a conscious state,”it opens. “Soon I will come to apologize in person, but meanwhile I get to send this written communication for your kind inspection.”
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My interest in history led me to open Usher’s book. But what surprises the reader by the end is how none of the letters feel dated in any way. This extends to those letters in which fathers give advice to sons in matters of love. One might expect to wince from obsolete views of women from the age of Mad Men, but many men in the past defied the stereotypes of their times.
Writing on the occasion of his son’s wedding in 1971, Ronald Reagan advised, “some men feel their masculinity can only be proven if they play out in their own life all the locker-room stories, smugly confident that what a wife doesn’t know won’t hurt her…any man can find a twerp here and there who will go along with cheating, and it doesn’t take all that much manhood. It does take quite a man to remain attractive and to be loved by a woman who has heard him snore, seen him unshaven, tended him while he was sick and washed his dirty underwear…”
“You’ll never get in trouble if you say ‘I love you’at least once a day,”he closes.
John Steinbeck would have agreed and said as much in a response to a letter from his own son in 1959. The younger Steinbeck had fallen in love and wrote to his father to tell him of the new woman in his life.
“Girls have a way of knowing or feeling what you feel, but they usually like to hear it also,”the older Steinbeck wrote. “…If it is right, it happens—the main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.”
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I am realistic and I know letter writing will not survive, Shaun Usher’s thoughtful selections really are memories of a past that will not return. For all my own respect for the art of letter writing I still rely on email with all its shortcomings, but in the end we can’t blame email for the regrettable state of our written correspondence. Emoticons and barely constructed sentences are an act of will, not a requirement of the medium. Email is only a tool that reflects how we choose to use it.
Similarly, the words of love, sorrow, and wisdom in Letters of Note do not teach us how we should articulate emotions that they prove to be timeless. They teach us the importance of doing so at all, by any means available. Perhaps we delete our emails not because they are difficult to preserve beyond the next software update, but because so many of them are not worth retaining.
What the authors of Usher’s letters want us to do is to make sure we learn from their experiences and take nothing, and no one, for granted.
In 1819, a missionary named Lucy Thurston wrote to her daughter to inform her of a recent surgery. Thurston had breast cancer, enduring a mastectomy with no anesthetic in an open-air hut in the Hawaiian Islands.She speaks to us as much as to her daughter, saying, “And here is again your mother, engaged in life’s duties, and life’s warfare. Fare thee well. Be one with us in knowledge, sympathy, and love, though we see thee not, and when sickness prostrates, we feel not thy hand upon our brow.”
Read more letters at Shaun Usher’s blog Letters of Note.
–Photo Credit: Flickr/Liz West
I wrote a comment regarding the Redskins name and I received a response that it was being looked at as a “spam.” – Beuaty is in the eye of the beholder,” is the way opening remarks that I was trying to submit. And so, I would llie to see it posted!