The Letter

As in, "my baby wrote me a letter." Fans of Michael and Bill will remember our version that ends "no email, it was a letter." But I wonder how much longer we will remember what letters were, the kind you wrote on paper with pen (or even typewriter or computer) and sent through the mail in an envelope with a stamp on it? And is this passing of the epistle a great loss, or is my lament just one more sign that I've passed my own sell-by date?

I used to be a letter writer. I carried on a fairly extensive correspondence, mostly with professional colleagues: teachers, former teachers, and friends. I saved their letters to me (and on occasion a few of my letters to them) in folders marked by date and/or the name of the correspondent. I still have these folders, dozens of them stuffed with letters, stored away in filing cabinets or storage boxes dating back approximately to the beginning of my academic career as a graduate student in classics and later in English.

Why have I saved them? Well, now I must confess it's simple vanity -- that and nostalgia. Every once in a while I go through them and recall the circumstances of my life when I wrote or received these missives filled with comments on the mundane trivia of the time and the aspirations of a budding author. These old folders contain what I once thought of as my papers. I must have thought I would leave them behind for someone to rifle through in search of the secret to my genius. With no genius having emerged, I suspect I'll be trashing the lot of them at some point. But not before I sift through them at least once more just to catch a glimpse of my former self. Who knows, they may turn out to be amusing in ways I haven't anticipated.

Letters are often amusing, especially other people's letters. Some even rise to the level of literature. One of my roles after leaving academe was to administer a little program that provided funding for scholarly editing projects, some of which were devoted almost entirely to publishing correspondence. Most of our founding fathers, for example, were prodigious letter writers. I sometimes found myself wondering, as I glanced through recently published volumes of their correspondence, how they found time to do anything other than write letters, not to mention memorandums and orders and speeches. But the best, in my opinion, are the letters of the Carlyles. You can actually read them online. It's like eavesdropping on history and peeking into the private lives of two very strong and somewhat troubled and troubling personalities, Jane and Thomas.

There are many collections of literary letters worth reading, but none can top Mark Twain's for shear entertainment value. These too are available online. Twain was another prodigious letter writer, and his wit was often sharp. He once explained his slow response to a correspondent in this way: "I am a long time answering your letter, my dear Miss Harriet, but then you must remember that it is an equally long time since I received it -- so that makes us even, & nobody to blame on either side."

The temptation is to quote at length from Twain, but that must wait for another occasion. Twain seems often to have felt himself surrounded by idiots. One wonders what he would have made of email or, heavens forfend, Twitter. He probably would have said nothing was ever more aptly named.