Needs Citation

A friend sent me a letter the other day. It was the first one I received in some time. The ones before that had been either announcements, which were formally required of the occasion (weddings, graduations) and letters from people traveling abroad. Travellers are bound by tradition to write letters.

This one was a domestic affair, not marked by grand occasion or locale. Unless you consider Houston, at 180 miles away from my home, as being grand in anything beyond humidity.

My friend noted in his opening line that people don’t write enough letters anymore. That’s an understatement.

Intimate and tactile, letters are one of precious few things that don’t cost money but still have value. They are communication that actually comes with burden, which shows the importance of the act. Each stroke of the pen is shared. The ink, the paper. The writing is the thing, and each step (other than delivery) is done by the author rather than a machine.

The email, for all it’s efficacy, loses this personal burden. Thus, it loses the implied level of motivation on the writer’s part.

Perfectly befitting a complaint to my cable company, an email removes almost all burdens. In my mail client, I don’t even need to type out the address of the recipient; my computer already knows after two letters. This is the level of desire I have to write this note; I do so because it’s easy.

For those who I care about or with an emotional subject (love letter, indictment) I would not want such ease.

The day will come that my computer is smart enough to filter out cliches or poor structure. It will make my missives and love notes all the more compelling based on semantic research. My pale, plastic box that traps and routes electrons will make my task of writing even easier than it already has.

But in doing so, those writings will mean even less.

So I will try to find reasons that merit the letter, as you should to. They are a thing to be kept and treasured, and a tradition to keep burning.

What do you think about letters? Do you think people will still be writing them in half a century?

Talking with groups of friends is an unquiet joy. If you share ideas that seem novel or at least interesting, even better. Blogging, and the internet in general, offers a near endless supply of potential for that. It doesn’t always deliver.

That’s not the internets fault. I struggle to find a good medium. Forums might do, if well moderated. YouTube does not. Never read YouTube comments. It’s bad for your heart, bad for your soul.

One of my classes left a nugget about writing that went a little something like this: “We write to be read.”

This post, being my first, will likely not get read. It has no keywords, no SEO and really no point.

I’m going to be brutally honest with you and myself. I wrote this to replace the default post that WordPress makes you install it. It seemed more constructive than deleting it, which I can never do.

Mr. WordPress is such a helpful guy, I can’t bring myself to let his work be for nothing.

The moral of the stroy is keep things short. Or not.