The dying art of letter writing

by Shireen SENADHIRA

I asked some young people, at random, about letter writing. They all replied the same. They said that if they could, they would rather telephone the people concerned, and if available, for speedy contact, they will sms through mobile phones. These young people were mostly busy with work or study or both. The long and short of it is that, no, they really will not sit down and write a letter. In the present day, it is not in the line of things they do.

One of them surmised my little research thus:

"I write long emails through the internet, send short messages through mobile phones and listen to my friends voices through telephones. Isn't that enough? Writing snail mail? That's too slow."

The proliferation of long distance services has brought the cost of speaking out of district and country, down so drastically, giving us another reason to pick up the phone instead of the pen. In former times, writing letters were the only means of communication over long distances. Now, even business is done this way, business related people would pick up the phone before picking up a pen. However, about 50% say that they follow business matters with a letter to document the conversation.

Most people like one to one conversation. Interacting is an important component of communication. However, there are times when writing is better. Sure, it's nice to hear someone say "I love you" but to read it in a letter, knowing that someone took the time to write makes it much more meaningful. It is permanent and even if at some time in the future, they take those words back, aha! you still have a permanent record of it. Once written you can read it over an over again, cherish it time after time, knowing that someone cared enough to take the time to write. Writing needs thought, concentration and effort. People often speak without thought and it is for the most part an automatic response unlike writing.

The phones are not the only reason that people have stopped writing. The greeting card has usurped letter writing. Today one can go to a store and get a card for just about anything, whether the greeting is "happy birthday," "get well soon", or "sorry I forgot", etc. Sending such cards are nice gestures too but they aren't really personal. I, myself sometimes buy cards like these, but I add a little note or send a letter too with it to say it in my own words as well.

Well, of course, one cannot forget the ubiquitous e-mail and the smses. Why take time pondering to write a long letter when you can do it in a few brief sentences, often incomplete, wrought with abbreviations. Some of the messages are so abbreviated that it makes the reader crazy trying to decipher it. Sometimes it leaves one nonplussed. But, the sender is ever ready to tap in such messages and send it to the other of the internet.

The advent of telephones since the late 1800s and long distance telephone services becoming cheaper and the growing internet are all making letter writing a lost art. Actually, it needn't be so. Modern technology offers to bring it back. Forget the tedious task of putting pen to paper, writing, rewriting, keep handwriting legible, spelling, grammar and welcome the personal computer with word processing, spelling and grammar checks. Then, also if you are creative bent, you can buy software to create beautiful and evocative cards too.

Can you imagine cards and letters filled with sincerity and inspiring words, for both the author and the receiver. Sure, you'll like it as will, the receiving party. Who knows then, maybe they'll write back. That's the time you will feel very special.

Many years ago when I was staying with a friend in her house, there was much excitement when the postman rang his bell. Not only the elder sister, who apparently was waiting for the postman, but the entire household, mother, grandma, a visiting aunt and domestics, all came to the verandah to see whether a blue air mail letter arrived. Luckily, it did. After much chatter, it took quite awhile for all to disperse to their places and the elder sister to her room. I found out that it was a letter from her fiance who was completing his studies in England. I wonder how it could have been if the letter didn't arrive. Those were the bitter sweet days and weeks lovers used to wait to receive a reply to their love letters.

Similar sentiments are echoed in a passage written by Shiva, V. S. Naipaul's younger brother. Shiva was so much younger than the famous author. V. S. Naipaul the Nobel Laureate was the offspring of an immigrant Indian family of an agricultural community living in Trinidad. He later studied in Oxford on scholarship and lived in England thereafter. His writings were comparable with Joseph Conrad. Here is the passage:

"Sometimes the postman arrived with blue air mail letters, the cause of much excitement in our household. Occasionally I would listen with a kind of dazed astonishment to this notional being - my brother - reading a short story on the radio. When I was about eleven this mysterious figure suddenly arrived among us. Why he should thus manifest himself, I had no idea. Still, it was an interlude of wonder; of intense excitement for me. I would go and stand in the doorway of his bedroom and gaze curiously upon him as he lay on the bed, smoking cigarettes out of a green tin. The tableau revived my father's fading image. He too, in the warm quiet afternoons, would lie on that same bed, reading and smoking cigarettes."

This redolent image catches much of the spirit of the time so expressively filled as it is with heart and drama. In the same vein, reading "Letters between a Father and Son" by V S Naipaul is a moving experience, to watch the shifting balance, so delicately evolved, of a relationship between a good man and his good son and of the natural yielding of the one to the other. Such letters show the life and times of Trinidad and England and India, more than fifty years ago. These letters that encapture a historical record of those times are interesting as well as fascinating to read.

The reputation of Princess Diana as a humanitarian was mostly due to her sending personalized "thank you" letters. She had talent to reach out people from diverse backgrounds and make meaningful connections with them. How? She wrote thank you letters to everyone: from waiters and servers to security guards and drivers, to CEOs and presidents. Everyone, no matter what their rank received a thank you note from the princess" and then, in turn became her personal supporter. What Princess Diana did was to capitalize on the pleasure of receiving a personal thank you letter. The effort needed to create a thoughtful and personal letter was well rewarded.

What is needed to revive the art of letter writing, specifically, thank you letters? We need to pay attention to Princess Diana and appreciate that a well-written thank you letter can express our fondest feelings and emotions. Such a letter writer can benefit from the goodwill generated by the expression of simple yet honest sentiments. Yes, they are well worth the effort to create! We may also need a little help in creating them in a way that is meaningful and personal. Help that allows us to share in the joy of sending thank you letters with little of the effort associated with writing them.

Whilst letter writing may be on the decline due to technology, many appreciate the gift of a letter. Missives from Jane Austen are indeed works of art. Her young contented years at Steventon in England, where she wrote the first draft of "Pride and Prejudice" and "Sense and Sensibility" and the intervening period of living in Bath, where she wrote nothing but letters before her final productive and happy years at Chawton are all reflected in her letters, some to her sister Cassandra. She wrote freely about money and marriage and depicted England in that time of end of the eighteenth and beginning of nineteenth centuries. Two instances are reflected in the following:

"People get so horridly poor and economical in this part of the world that I have no patience with them. Kent is the only place for happiness; everybody is rich there." - Letter to Cassandra 18-19 December 1798.

"We found only Mrs. Lance at home, and whether she boasts any offspring besides a grand pianoforte did not appear" They will not come often, I dare say. They live in a handsome style and are rich, and she seemed to like to be rich, and we gave her to understand that we were far from being so; she will soon feel therefore that we are not worth her acquaintance." Letter to Cassandra 7-8 January 1807.

Edith Wharton, the famous American author, describes her discontent on her return home after her travels and living in Europe with her family for many years. She wrote to her friend Sally Norton in 1903:

"My first few weeks in America are always miserable, because the tastes cursed with are all of a kind that cannot be gratified here, & I am not enough in sympathy with our, "gros public" to make up for the lack on the aesthetic side. One's friends are delightful, but we are none of us Americans, we don't think or feel as the Americans do, we are

the wretched exotics produced in a European glass-house, the most deplace & useless class on earth! All of which outburst is due to my first sight of American streets, my first hearing American voices, & the wild, dishevelled backwoods look of everything when one first comes home! You see my in my heart of hearts, a heart never unbosomed, I feel in America as you say you do in England "out of sympathy with everything. And in England I like it all" institutions, tradition, mannerisms, conservatisms, everything but the women's clothes, & the having to go to church every Sunday."

Sometimes we get a feeling of discontent too after travelling abroad in clean and well cared for countries. Mostly, just after arrival, when we come slap bang on our roads and see them in such disrepair with ill kept road sides. Wharton's outburst was due to two reasons.

One, her profound aesthetic sense, nurtured in European scenes and kept alive by her regular foreign travels. The other, her ability to comprehend, as only the outsider could comprehend, something of the substance that humanizes a landscape, something of the interconnectedness of people and place that gives meaning to the individual and the collective life of a culture.

That Edith Wharton felt herself out of sympathy with her native land did not mean that she did not understand it: her discomfort was perhaps one of the chief sources of inspiration for her work as writer both of fiction and of cultural criticism.

Hand written letters contain many properties which could not be substituted by other means of communication. Speedy communication methods not only flatten and shorten communication but also feelings. Twitter is effective for broadcasting what you are eating for lunch and the email fantastic, for quick exchanges on the most pertinent pieces of information. But when it comes to sharing one's true thoughts, sincere sympathies, ardent love and deepest gratitude, words travelling along an invisible superhighway will never suffice.

Sending a letter is the next best thing to showing up personally at someone's door. Ink from your pen touches the stationery; your fingers touch the paper. Something tangible from your world travels through machines and hands and deposits itself in another's mailbox. Your letter is then carried inside as an invited guest. The paper that was sitting on your desk, now sits on another's. The recipient handles the paper that you handled. Letters create a connection that modern, impersonal forms of communication could never approach.

In today's cells phones, email and text messages, letter writing can seem hopelessly outdated. But it is an art worth bringing back and not because of some misplaced sense of nostalgia either.

The writing and reception of letters will always offer an experience that modern technology cannot touch as can be seen in the above passages.