Maria Popova
tells the story of her great-grandfather and a misdelivered letter; she
goes on to offer an appreciation of Simon Garfield's To the Letter. I've heard
Garfield interviewed a out the book, and I've already got it on my
shortlist of books to buy. Popova's piece is a fine introduction to what
to expect. She writes in part:
Garfield attributes a good deal of the
humanity of the letter — something he so poetically terms its “physical
candor and the life-as-she-is-suffered quality” — to the tangibility of
how it travels from sender to recipient. Though we know a great more
today about how information travels on the internet, Garfield argues for
an “intrinsic integrity” that letters hold over other modes of
communication and explains:
Some of this has to do with the
application of hand to paper, or the rolling of the paper through the
typewriter, the effort to get things right first time, the perceptive
gathering of purpose. But I think it also has something to do with the
mode of transmission, the knowledge of what happens to the letter when
sealed. We know where to post it, roughly when it will be collected, the
fact that it will be dumped from a bag, sorted, delivered to a van,
train or similar, and then the same thing the other end in reverse. We
have no idea about where email goes when we hit send. We couldn’t track
the journey even if we cared to; in the end, it’s just another
vanishing. No one in a stinky brown work coat wearily answers the phone
at the dead email office. If it doesn’t arrive we just send it again.
But it almost always arrives, with no essence of human journey at all.
The ethereal carrier is anonymous and odorless, and carries neither
postmark nor scuff nor crease. The woman goes into a box and emerges
unblemished. The toil has gone, and with it some of the rewards....
Garfield’s core argument, while
anchored a tad too stubbornly and narrowly to the preservation of
letters as a medium, speaks powerfully to a broader urgency — the
increasingly endangered species of meticulous, thoughtful
self-revelation and deep mutual understanding through the written word
in the age of reactionary responses and knee-jerk replies. He captures
this beautifully:
Great miserabilist that he was, Philip
Larkin was spot-on with his famous line from ‘An Arundel Tomb’ … what
will survive of us is love. Letters fulfill and safeguard this prophecy.
Without letters we risk losing sight of our history, or at least its
nuance. The decline and abandonment of letters — the price of progress —
will be an immeasurable defeat.