For the Love of a Letter

I am not a woman of letters, at least not in the formal sense of that phrase, but I am a woman who writes letters, and this past February I signed in with InCoWriMo (International Correspondence Writing Month) to have my own experience of what my husband found so enjoyable the year before.

I am a part of that generation where letter writing was the only means of distance correspondence. Yes, there were phones. I’m not that ancient. But if you had a father that limited the household to 5 minute long distance phone calls, you were and remained basically a letter writer. In truth, the most exciting time of my day at university was mail call, when you went to your mail box to see if anyone had written to you. And nothing felt so treasured at the letter or letters you carried to your dorm to read in delicious solitude.

In fact, Bert and I started our relationship via letter, preceded by

only two short conversations over a weekend when he spoke once in Vancouver. We wrote for 3 ½ years, filling seven journals, particularly exploring the Vietnam War due to its impact on both of us. They were marvelous, honest conversations, for when you are writing in a journal, there is no taking it back or hitting delete. That correspondence blossomed into friendship, then love and ultimately marriage. How’s that for the power of the pen.

In InCoWriMo, I am meeting many interesting people from all over the world. A soul-sister in Massachusetts, a young Israeli lad living on a Moshav, a Rabbi scholar from my birth city, Philadelphia, PA, and a Welshman with a great sense of humor, to mention a few. Yes there are days Bert and I both grimace when the mailman comes. Our stack of unanswered letters waxes and wanes, but when it gets depth to it, we each hope for a day without mail.

Nothing in this digital world, for me, can take the place of letter writing which came back graphically when one woman I write to, a gal of extensive writing talent which generates captivating letters, sprained her thumb and had to type her letters for a while. There was no interesting handwriting, no doodles while thinking, no lovely colors or the artistry of various fountain pen nibs, no afterthoughts running vertically in the margins, no sense of the moment that writer was in, their struggles, their passion, their frustrations. Just black type on white paper. Even if she had chosen to use colored, fancy fonts, it still wouldn't be her spilling out on the page, lining out words that got ahead of her thinking, caret-ing in words that got lost in a flurry of thoughts, adding art to the page in caricatures or pen and ink drawings. Nor is there any way to explain the sense of connection hand written letters engender that typing cannot even touch.

Recently, I found this marvelous book which I bought as a gift for Bert. In all honesty, the gift did have the flavor of buying your father a wagon for his birthday, but… The book is entitled Letters of Note compiled by Shaun Usher. Shared letters such as the ones found in it are like treasured secrets whispered in your ear. Elvis Presley to U.S. President Richard Nixon; Louise Armstrong to Lance Corporal Villec; Ray Bradbury to Brian Sibley; The Connell Family to the Ciulla Family; Kurt Vonnegut to Charles McCarthy. Three hundred and forty of them in all. Here are bits of three of them that gave me pause.

Francis Crick to Michael Crick, his twelve-year-old son at boarding school – March 19, 1953

The letter relates his jubilant news of his co-discovery of the “beautiful” structure of DNA, the most important scientific discovery of modern times accompanied by drawings he made to help his son visualize it. He ends this letter with:

Read this carefully so that you understand it. When you come home, we will show you the model.

Lots of love,

Daddy

Flannery O’Connor to a Professor of English who wrote and asked her to explain her short story A Good Man is Hard to Find, for which his class was struggling to find an acceptable interpretation – March 28, 1961

O’Connor’s last two paragraphs conclude in this manner:

The meaning of a story should go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it, but meaning cannot be captured in an interpretation. If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction. Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it.

My tone is not meant to be obnoxious. I am in a state of shock.

Flannery O’Connor

Richard Feynman, world class physicist and Nobel Prize winner to his wife who is dead – October 17, 1946

The last paragraph and the P.S.:

…I’ll bet you are surprised that I don’t even have a girlfriend (except you, sweetheart) after two years. But you can’t help it, darling, nor can I—I don’t understand it, for I have met many girls and very nice ones and I don’t want to remain alone—but in two or three meetings they all seem ashes. You only are left to me. You are real.

My darling wife, I adore you.

I love my wife. My wife is dead.

Rich

P.S. Please excuse my not mailing this—but I don’t know your new address.

......

Have someone out there you love, you miss, you've left along the way and regret it? Go clean out that dried up old fountain pen, get some paper that can handle ink, and do yourself a great and loving favor. Write a letter.

Baby Out with the Bath Water

by Christina Carson

I was sitting on our bed, fountain pen in hand. Nightshade was the ink color in it which harmonized with the soft gray of that rainy Sunday morning. In my lap was a little writing table and on it several sheets of Japanese paper as smooth as silk. I was about to write a letter to a friend of old, writing in the old way, ink pen on paper. But what was actually pending was a remarkable experience, an insight couched in the words of the dated saw: Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

You see, as I started to write that letter, almost immediately I felt what happens when we communicate with one another through this specific form of writing – fountain pen and paper. I sat amazed at what I felt as the words rolled out on the page. They didn’t create the feeling of being constrained like the short jags we exchange via social media. They didn't instill a sense of being rushed or behind, or a need to get through quickly like digital communication elicits. They did not feel like someone fulfilling a duty or checking off a list of To Do’s. Instead the words were pulling up from the depths of me something so poignant that I had no desire to zero in on the mundane or the trivial. When I’d finished, what I mailed off was a small part of me, given to my dear friend. She will, I’m sure, read and reread it, as  handwritten letters always invite. And we will reclaim a relationship I’d not formerly handled implicit with the love and gratefulness I have always felt for her.

I realized more powerfully than I was able to ignore that we humans are making a very big mistake to allow technology to own us as it does: to arrange our priorities, to determine the rhythm of our lives, to race us past what truly matters to get to yet another empty distraction. To live a life dictated by digital parameters is causing us to lose values, attitudes and activities that help us to remember the sense of humanity that falls so naturally out of the words—human being.

I don’t pretend to know the why of this; I just know it is so. The power of words to convey wisdom, peace and love do not come out of my digital reader. They do however, come off the inked page of a book. A photographer friend told me the other day she is going to add black-and-white photography to her artistic endeavors because she cannot feel the depth of art she seeks through digital photography—too many mechanical pieces between her and the work, encouraging the belief that a single moment isn't worth your all. That you can clean it up later.

Here is one possible explanation. All life is about connection, because the crowning experience of life is realizing the absolute interconnectedness of All Things and living from that realization. Such an experience requires of us that we slow down, quiet down, and engage with an activity in a manner which actually draws out of us something new, something more than we’d known before about ourselves or life. 

For this to happen, we must be challenged. When life no longer requires us to develop ourselves, because, in the name of progress, it makes redundant the very skills that engaged us with that task, we wither on the vine of boredom. For example, if I don’t have to know words and spelling; if I don’t have to take responsibility for writing as the art form it is; if I am not involved in the stages of addressing, stamping and closing an envelope that brings the entire experience to a satisfying end, then what am I left with for my efforts? How empty am I going to allow my life to become? What we seem to have convinced ourselves of in the froth and speed and flashing lights of the digital world is that quantity has surpassed quality as a means of determining richness of life. 

Oh and by the way, here’s one more item I found in the bathwater. When was the last time you coffee lovers had a cup of perked coffee. You know, that kind that fills the entire house with that delicious aroma and treats you to how fine coffee can truly taste. When did we let that one go? And why?

Want to see what it feels like for you to own your life again? Start with a fountain pen and paper and write a letter to someone, anyone, even me. Then notice the tenor of your anticipation as you wait for the reply. 

Christina Carson, Writer

Novels of Substance and Story