Janice Schuster has a
graceful appreciation of letter writing in today's Washington Post. The pieces I see usually deal with the benefits of handwriting for the writer; Schuster also writes of the benefits to the recipient.
I kept a vigil for the mail. I would sit in the bay window of our living room, reading a book and keeping an ear out for the engine of the mail carrier’s jeep. Or I would hurry home from school, eager to see if any blue missives waited for me at command central, our dining room table.
The losses are specified.
But I worry about the loss of the physical manifestation of this correspondence. I know I could print my favorites, but printed typescript simply does not convey the sense of a person the way my decades-old letters did: coffee stains, for instance, or the small curve of my grandmother’s script. And e-mails are just too easy to pop off and can be so abrupt. I remember the rambling letters I once exchanged with friends; sometimes it took several drafts to get something just right. The ritual of collecting the mail meant something, too, as did my sense that, in holding a letter, I was holding the letter writer.