We hardly ever say “mail” anymore.
That word implies archaic practices and products: stamps, pens, paper, and calling others “dear.”
Today we correspond faster than it takes to say “correspond,” typing in code to make it even faster.
MU, HRU
GR8, GTG
Even email feels obsolete.
As a child, I waited, frenzied, for our daily mail. The very theory of mail obsessed me: It linked people miles apart. So did phones, but written words seemed more sacred, transforming blank paper into bulletins: This is a craft. Trusting strangers to carry and deliver these: This is an act of faith.
We were taught letter-writing in third grade, where each student was assigned a faraway business to which we must write, seeking responses. I wrote to a tractor manufacturer.
Starting letters, even to strangers, with “dear,” and signing off after “love” or “yours truly,” did not seem bizarre. Yet it turned each missive, semantically at least, into an act of love.
The fifth-century chronicler Hellanicus of Lesbos credited Persia’s Queen Atossa with writing the first-ever letter in 500 BCE, although no trace of it remains.
How radical such contact must have felt back then, although at first permitted only to the privileged literate and whoever could hire scribes.
I pictured people wearing togas, tunics, mu’umu’us and kimonos, writing by torchlight and starlight in castles and trenches about crossbows, leprosy, and saints.
Handwritten correspondence fuels its own psychology because each card or letter is a social interaction, an engagement with an unpredictable response, protracted and projected over time and space.
Thus letter-writing is a risk. Even if said letter is only a shopping list, its composition and dispatch require effort, courage, and expense, exposing its sender to possible misunderstanding, mockery, or silence and the pain of wondering, perhaps forever, whether it arrived.
Sent letters make us wait. They force us to stay patient and unsure, imagining ten thousand possible responses, with twenty thousand suspended hopes and fears.
For anyone who expects instant gratification, this would be hell.
At twelve, I planned to someday be an avid adult correspondent, dispatching the latest news with insightful analysis on seahorse stationery in that slanting script we’d learned at school.
I understood only subconsciously that letter-writing was — for we who loathed ourselves, who were not beautiful, whose parents called us pigs — a precious way in which to possibly be liked.
It is a kind of grace: a still caesura in which to practice, unseen, our powers of description, consolation, and persuasion, and choose stamps, stickers, and sealing wax to best suit each recipient. Each card and letter is a gift.
Reading the works of famous correspondents whose letters were archived — Erich Maria Rilke, for instance — my young self wanted to join them.
History had other plans.
Who could have dreamed that correspondence would become easy and instantaneous? Who could have dreamed that replies would arrive within a breath?
Who could have dreamed that, although private correspondence still exists, the vast majority would become public: chats, streams, social media, and other apps where countless strangers worldwide join, shape, doom, and even dominate our dialogues.
It’s fast. It’s often fun, but sometimes scary. It can end careers in microseconds.
And, for all its ease, is modern correspondence erasing — or never teaching anyone to start with — crucial mental skills built into old-skool correspondence? Texting fuels neither eloquence nor patience nor the power to survive suspense. Chatting on streams and social media prioritizes neither privacy nor intimacy but performativity. Anonymous communication lets us be guiltlessly crueler than old-fashioned correspondence ever did.
Does posting puke emojis systematically render us less polite? When we no longer start and end our messages with “dear” and “love,” however formulaic that once was, are we becoming cold?
Or does current-day correspondence build positive skills? Do instant messaging and rapid responses render us confident and calm and better able to swiftly articulate our thoughts?
Had you told our ancestors, “Someday, people will correspond instantly, like this” — tapping in pantomime — “and even send each other pictures, videos and sound,” they would have queried, “What are videos?” then stood there stunned as you explained.
Our ancestors in their corsets and kilts would ask us how and when. They’d think of twenty thousand things to tell their partners, parents, and those friends they left behind in Abyssinia. The very thought of those missives arriving instantly would feel miraculous, like actually being gods.