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stuff.co.nz
Why don't we write love letters anymore?
ALECIA SIMMONDS
Last updated 12:34 20/09/2014
At the age of 18 I left my partner in Australia to backpack around
South-East Asia. The world back then was an email-less, skype-less and
mobile-less place; travelling meant passing months without talking, made mute
by a trackless sea.
But in place of speech or unattractive skype chin-shots, we had letters.
Letters that would find their way across oceans of distance into a dusty poste
restante mail-box until they were claimed, torn open, read, re-read, carried
everywhere during the day and placed underneath your pillow at night.
Letters were the medium for lovers par excellence.
I can still remember the thrill of spying the bundle of letters with my
name painted on them in drippy purple ink. They were tied in silk ribbon and
inside would be snippets of my partner’s soul: paintings, poetry, tear-stained
pages bursting with frustrated passion, wilted flowers and sprinklings of
glitter (it was the 90s – everything came with sprinklings of glitter.) I
experienced these letters as a physical visitation; I held them as I would have
once held her.
These letters contained a torturous paradox: both a reminder of
separation and a defiance of distance. They spoke of her absence but created a
tactile presence.
There is no form of communication today that can compare to the delight
of a letter: emails are urgent, phone-chatter is thoughtless and skype banishes
imagination. They are fleeting mediums for a fleeting world.
And so I suppose I should not be surprised to learn that by the end of
this year Australia Post will probably have scaled back its delivery services
to only three days per week. The reason, quite simply, is that we no longer
write letters. In fact, last year there were one billion less letters sent than
in 2008.
Of course this will mean devastating job losses to an already skeletal
organization. And it will mean the privatization of yet another publicly
consumed resource. But I am convinced that the loss is not just economic.
In losing letters we are losing the art of translating our souls into
words.
Lest this sound grandiose, let me outline three ways that letter-writing
will improve your life.
1) Letter-writing will slow you down: Like
slow-cooking or slow-eating, letter-writing is a plodding and ponderous art.
Historically people would often have two letter books, one (tempestuous) book
of drafts and the other (restrained) final product. Sitting down to write a
letter had a ritual about it: smoothing the paper, shaking the fountain pen and
thinking. It had to be done in a quiet place away from the children or family.
Today we call this mindfulness. Letter-writing required you to reflect upon
yourself and the person to whom you are writing, to halt the hurtling emotions
of everyday life and take time to put them into words. There is nothing
efficient about a letter. It defies the spiritual impoverishment of capitalist
time as you while away an afternoon in pleasurable reflection.
2) Letter-writing produces self-knowledge. Writing
a letter is nothing less than an exercise in autobiography; it demands
emotional intelligence as you turn the chaotic events of your life into a
narrative for the receiver. And in so doing, you write yourself into history.
How often have you downloaded emails or copied out precious text messages?
Historians reconstruct the everyday lives of past people through the boxes of
letters that ancestors have found in attics. And as an historian, each time I
look at Matthew Flinders’ letters with the flowers that his wife pressed on the
back pages, I wonder what our generation will leave behind?
3) Letter-writing improves your love life.
Philosopher Roland Barthes says that each love letter is a version of
‘Je pense a vous’, which has been unpacked to mean: ‘I have nothing to say
except that you are the one to whom I want to say nothing.’ Or ‘I think
of you now and not always because if I thought of you always then my life would
descend into chaos.’ The very fact of writing a love letter is often this
simple. But the emotions expressed within it are vast and complex universes of
desire.
Firstly, the fact that they are written is an act of exposure and
vulnerability. Speech melts into air. Writing leaves an indelible trace. Once
sent, a letter can not be taken back. You have left your heart open to
judgment.
Secondly, as every letter written is an exchange, then it means that
love letters are nothing less than a jointly-scripted love story. Writing
compels lovers to write, to elaborate upon their sentiments. Words don’t just
mirror our feelings, they expand upon them, let them grow large and abundant
and dizzying. The story we write through love letters is a story of two souls
intertwining in inky delight; the creation of a future world.
Finally, love-letters transform the banal into the heroic. When we talk
to someone before us we have no capacity to imagine them as anything other than
what they are. A letter, on the other hand, is a wakeful dream. It’s an address
to an idealised object that hovers on an imaginary plain. There is plenty of
time to learn that your lover is hopelessly human. Love-letters prolong the
fantastical. And in years to come they can be read and re-read and held and
wept over as a reminder of something quite magical.
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In
addition to this blog, I have authored the premiere book on
Netiquette, "Netiquette IQ - A Comprehensive Guide to Improve, Enhance
and Add Power to Your Email". You can view my profile, reviews of the
book and content excerpts at:
www.amazon.com/author/paulbabicki
If you would like to listen to experts in all aspects of Netiquette and communication, try my radio show on BlogtalkRadio and an online newsletter via paper.li.I have established Netiquette discussion groups with Linkedin and Yahoo. I am also a member of the International Business Etiquette and Protocol Group and Minding Manners among others. I regularly consult for the Gerson Lehrman Group, a worldwide network of subject matter experts and I have been contributing to the blogs Everything Email and emailmonday . My work has appeared in numerous publications and I have presented to groups such as The Breakfast Club of NJ Rider University and PSG of Mercer County New Jersey.
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www.amazon.com/author/paulbabicki
If you would like to listen to experts in all aspects of Netiquette and communication, try my radio show on BlogtalkRadio and an online newsletter via paper.li.I have established Netiquette discussion groups with Linkedin and Yahoo. I am also a member of the International Business Etiquette and Protocol Group and Minding Manners among others. I regularly consult for the Gerson Lehrman Group, a worldwide network of subject matter experts and I have been contributing to the blogs Everything Email and emailmonday . My work has appeared in numerous publications and I have presented to groups such as The Breakfast Club of NJ Rider University and PSG of Mercer County New Jersey.
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