Comments on: Letters in the age of e-mail

By: Tahmina

Tahmina — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 15:33:26 +0000

A beautiful piece.
I have not written letters in ages, nor have I received any. IT has taken over us, all that we are left with is the dry dissemination of information and plain messages. Just the other day, my office e-mail crashed, all my e-mails vanished in a second.
Apart from the fact that you can hold letters close to you, there is also this beauty about handwritten letters- the dainty sheets of paper, the folds, the scent of the writer, the envelope. Handwritings are so unique to each individual and there is a certain warmth that it conveys. Typed writings are all the same- flat and plain. Yet, we switch to e-mails and never bother writing letters- perhaps because in many ways, this age has also taught us to be distant and fast paced.
This piece reminded me of those long letters I had once received- they were truly so much more valuable than any of the e-mails that I have in my mail box!

By: Jim

Jim — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 16:38:00 +0000

Yes, the material existence of old letters gives a special value and sometimes the only evidence that such thoughts ever existed. My substitute use of e-mail has now completely replaced handwriten letters in my life and much is lost.

A close friend, the poet Charles David Wright, and I used to handwrite each other frequently and at great length. When he died tragically he left an unfinished book, unpublished drafts of poems, unfinished articles, and much correspondence. His university archived his “papers,” gathered by his wife Ruth. She had requested and I send back all of Chuck’s correspontence to add to the rest. Later I visited the university library just to check up on their preservation of Chuck’s “papers.” It was such a pleasure to see my bundles of letters from him and mine to him preserved there. We had talked over our reading, our emergent socialist thinking, played with words, and in other ways “corresponded.”

As Mahmud says, “I do sometimes worry that letters may last longer than digitized text.” My experience is that they do indeed last longer. I cannot now recover any of the early e-mails sent or received that in the 80’s came to replace my use of handwritten or typed letters. Maybe it is just ego (no preservation, no materiality) but my personal correspondence is nothing to what it once was.

By: kristin

kristin — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 19:04:00 +0000

I have boxes of old letters too. Sometimes I start going through them, planning to throw some away since they are not from my near and dear but I get side tracked reading them and usually end up stuffing them back in the file drawer or box.

I used to write a lot of long letters and then lots of long email but over the years it’s become a line or two instead of the pages it used to be. I write fewer people, and those I write also write very short emails.

In an effort to get back to both sending and receiving long correspondence, I have started making cards, writing in them and sending them off to children, grandchildren and aunts. The first week it went well. The second week, not so much. This week, I have four cards sitting here but haven’t written anything except on pathetic card. One problem is that I’m getting phone calls in return instead of letters so I say everything I would say on paper on the phone. Maybe I’ll have to quit talking on the phone.

By: Anjali

Anjali — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 14:03:00 +0000

I think it is the materiality of the letter that makes it so attractive– and important. I have letters that were written to me from over thirty years ago, and even though some are in tatters, it is still almost a thrill to handle them and read them.

In today’s age of online insubstantial exchanges, letters help make the conversations we have had seem more momentous, more significant.

That said, I am also one of those who write fewer and fewer letters even as I beg my friends to write me one. For me, it is the mailing part of the letter that is tedious and forbidding. Can’t be organized enough to have envelopes, stamps, etc at hand when I need them.

By the way, am I the only one who has seen that Americans write more cards/letters than do the subcontinentals? Or is this confirmed by others’ experience as well?