The delights of letter writing
In 1957, Queen Elizabeth II traveled to the U.S. for her first state visit to thenPresident Dwight D. Eisenhower. Years later, the two met again at Balmoral Castle, the queen’s residence in Scotland. What they discussed behind closed doors that afternoon remains a mystery, but one thing is certain: Eisenhower was besotted with the queen’s scones. Months after serving them for tea, she mailed the president her recipe — a diplomatic gesture that, today, might seem improbably quixotic.
The death knell of written correspondence has sounded for years: electronic diversion, demographic changes, the economy, evolving security and privacy concerns, the decline of etiquette, the lumbering bureaucracy of the U.S. Postal Service, each a nail in the snail mail coffin. But letter writing is a prolonged conversation — and prolonged conversations are perhaps what’s truly disappeared. Unlike the organized whimsy of Instagram, the transient email or haphazard tweet, written letters are meditative and communicative, at once public and private. Letters can be funny, mundane or profound; they are deliberate even when spontaneous; they resist the easy outrage of digital discourse. Like the “forever stamp” used to mail them, letters offer a record of personal history.
The average American household receives just 10 pieces of personal mail per year, not counting holiday cards and invitations. That figure stands in stark contrast to the hundreds of alerts and infodumps that define our digital landscape, exchanges that are often banal and uncivil. Cards require more time to compose than electronic messages. They are also slower to arrive, giving both writer and recipient a chance to tap into patience or gratitude. And snail mail is in fact a feat of innovation: Consider that USPS manages to deliver 187.8 million parcels across the country every day (a number that dwarfs Amazon Prime’s shipments). Bush pilots fly letters to the edge of Alaska, and mules carry handwritten cards to the Havasupai Indian Reservation at the bottom of Grand Canyon. New technologies have left few occasions for people to practice everyday literary arts, but old technologies are live with them.
April is National Letter Writing Month — a good time to rekindle this analog practice. While letters may seem outmoded in the internet age, written correspondence is in fact a vital democratic exercise: To write a letter is to weigh one’s words, to participate rather than consume. So dig out the stationery and pen a missive to an old friend, a state senator, a distant relative. They’ll thank you for it, and they might even send a note to say so. — Adrienne Bernhard, Northwestern University alumna, New York