written

2011-06-12T06:28:27Z

Letters.

Handwritten ones. I know this is a well-worn topic, but there is just something about handwritten letters. In essence, they aren't very different from emails: you exchange them with people, they often contain nothing very important, and they record things for you. (In that way, they're a lot like blogs.) But there is something about letters that emails don't have. Who's ever heard of treasuring an email? You just don't. And really, I think emails have replaced phone calls more than they've replaced letters.

Think about writing a letter. Even in the days when letters were regularly written, you sent them more often to people you loved than you sent them on matters of business. And of course, they took more effort. You started off simply putting effort into what you wrote because the act itself took time and was important. Looking back over the letters I've carefully saved, there was never much substance to them -- silly jokes and chit-chat -- but that's the whole point to them; they're handwritten narratives of your life with someone. Just seeing the letter, the name on the front, even the handwriting of someone important to you, opens a cache of memory. You remember getting it in the mail, opening it and reading it for the first time; then the words of the letter itself, whose sentences you remember reading before, which recollection enhances reading it again. And if you keep letters that go far enough back, you remember not only being that person who first got that letter, but also who you were with the person who wrote you that letter. I have found letters and notes that I exchanged with friends whom I don't talk to anymore, or whom I don't talk to so much, and it's like revisiting a time when we were good friends. Even if it's not in the note or the letter, I suddenly remember things we used to do together and laugh about, silly jokes I'd forgotten completely. I've been reminded of a time that's faded.

Photographs can also accomplish this. I think handwritten letters are more like photographs than they are like emails, which, the more I think about it, really do resemble phone calls. They are real-time and in that respect valuable, but they don't remind you of things in the same way. Perhaps because that isn't what they do. They connect you to someone in the moment, not through time.

Sentiment is not about an object in itself. A letter, a picture, a note; those are all just things. But they're also symbols, particularly of things that are gone, now. It's what you remember when you see those objects that makes them important to you. Something that you can hold in your hand, fading you back into the past.

It's a value we don't think to assign as we're writing them.

comments

Initially

2011-06-06T00:40:20Z

This is an experiment. I cannot tell you of what, because I don't know yet.

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descending_rose

written

Initially