Two years of obligatory ONLINENESS has calcified my misotechnia1 — not technophobia, as I don’t fear technology, rather I hate it. This hasn’t driven me away from digital communication entirely, but it’s inspired a return to a more analog mode. Over the past few months, I’ve taken up — or taken back — letter-writing as a way of keeping in touch with distant friends. Email has lost its charm for me, and texting has never held any, other than in the most utilitarian terms2. So, I’ve started sending letters. Hearkening back to the days when letter-writing was a common, everyday activity, I write on grid paper torn from a composition notebook, not on fancy or “special” stationery. I say I’m bringing letter writing back, but it remains to be seen whether anyone will reply to my recent missives.
It’s not uncommon to see references to the “lost art” of letter writing, a turn of phrase that makes writing letters sound precious, outside the capabilities of mere mortals. What’s been lost in the ascendance of digital modes of communication isn’t the art of letter writing but the habit, a quotidian engagement with the blank page in the service of everyday communication, a practice once common among all manner of people from all walks of life and every level of education. Letters were the preferred medium for communicating across great (or small) distances in the not so distant past when a long distance phone call (what is that?!) was considered an extravagant luxury, something reserved for the most time-sensitive emergency.
My own life in letters began in elementary school. From about fourth grade on, I corresponded regularly with two cousins, one older and one younger than me. For a couple of years I had a pen pal in Kuwait. International pen pals were not uncommon then, even in small-town Alabama. My next door neighbor had an English pen pal, and I wrote to her a few times as well, a sort of pen pal swap.
Letter writing wasn’t only for the postal service. I exchanged lengthy notes with friends in school, right up to high school graduation, after which several of those correspondences continued through the mail. My college P.O. box was a source of joy and frustration, depending on what was or wasn’t in it on a given day. Away at college, I exchanged letters with a wide variety of hometown friends and acquaintances: my high school friends, of course, but also the youth minister and other ladies from my church, parents of my friends, friends of my parents, my erstwhile boyfriend, new friends who lived elsewhere, and college friends during summer breaks. Lots of people wrote letters; it was a completely mundane practice, nothing special at all. Not to say that the letters themselves weren’t valued, but the act of writing and sending a letter was not remarkable. I have boxes of letters and school notes from middle school, high school, college, and beyond, even into the internet age.3
Unlike digital communication, the exchange of letters has a rhythm defined by the time and space traversed. It takes time for a letter to reach its destination, more time for a reply to be written, and more time still for the reply to be delivered. This unavoidable lapse of time means that sending a letter doesn’t engender any particular expectations as to when, or even if, you might receive an answer — you hope to get an answer, but there’s no way to know when it might come.4 No one expects the recipient of a letter to sit down immediately and draft a reply. You may even expect that it will take a few days, or longer, for someone to think about the letter and how she wants to reply. Your correspondent will sit down and write when the time and inclination present themselves. When the reply comes, it will be a sweet surprise, something you can hold and keep.
Letters are slow and often long. One attends to the present time and space, as well as to any message that may have come before. Time is hardly ever of the essence — you compose in your own time, at your own pace with little expectation of (which is not to say little desire for!) immediacy or hurry. Personal letters are rarely functional, beyond the simple fact of making contact and communicating, even though they often contain information. Part of writing a letter is creating an external representation of yourself — a unique artifact — for another person. In the heyday of letter writing, no letter was more unsatisfying for me than one that was typewritten or computer-printed. These days I’m thrilled to get any personal communication in my mailbox, handwritten or not.
As ever, I struggle to turn these disjointed ramblings into something for public consumption, something that might hold meaning for someone besides myself. What am I trying to communicate here? That there’s more to life than typing onto a screen (I type these words onto a screen — but they first took form in a notebook!), more fulfilling ways of communicating than everything this instant! It’s not just nostalgia that’s led me to write letters, or to write about writing letters. It’s a feeling of alienation, one I think is pervasive, and a desire to share a practice that contains something of an antidote.
I’ve adopted this term to describe my current attitude toward digital technology. Our tech-blinded society would label me a technophobe (or even more inaccurately, a luddite), but my attitude toward digital technology has more in common with misanthropy and misogyny than any phobia (even the the trendy ones that really just mean low-grade dislike, misunderstanding, or intolerance: fatphobia, transphobia, homophobia, etc.).
Contra 21st century dogma, communication has meaning and purpose beyond the merely transactional or functional.
My longest, and still ongoing, correspondence is with Jan, my co-author here. We’ve written back and forth in our “Bhindi” (whatever blank notebook is in service at a given time) for over 20 years.
Technically, you can now email or text to find out if someone has received your letter and when or if you might expect a reply, but in the context I’m thinking about here, doing that sort of defeats the purpose of writing a letter in the first place.