Letters lost in cyberspace
I personally have a box of letters that I have saved ever since I was a little girl. I have letters from family members I will cherish forever. But now, as e-mail is the prevalent way I correspond now, should I save these letters as if I recieved them in the mail.
The art of letter writing is becoming a lost art. We are a society of convience. E-mails are instantaneous. We can respond to invites, questions and I miss you’s instantly. The anxious wait by the traditional mailbox by the curve has been taken over by the sound of “You’ve Got Mail.”
At least, e-mail leaves a trace of correspondence unlike a quick cellphone call.
The NYTimes.com reports that people are corresponding more by e-mail, but they are not saving these traces of literary history. This is a problem between professional writers and their editors. How many great writers have collections of their personal correspondence, Ronald Reagan, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad and the list goes on and on. For example, Robert Lowell’s correspondence:
Book chat or no, great letters are great literature. In Robert Lowell’s letters, for instance, the mundane quickly opens up into whole worlds of feeling. ”I think our letters on the agency tax-money must have crossed,” Lowell wrote Elizabeth Hardwick, his soon-to-be ex-wife, in 1971. ”Through long hours of revising, a leisurely bath and a quick dressing, I have been thinking about our long past,” he continued. ”Not having you is like learning to walk.” Some entire books don’t convey as much raw emotion as those eight words do .
Designed for constant contact, e-mail messages inevitably have a different tone from postmarked missives that allow correspondents the time to ruminate and percolate, to apply a critical eye to their own lives. Often less nuanced, more prosaic, written in haste and subject to misunderstandings, e-mailed thoughts are microwaved, not braised. ”It often occurs to me that e-mail may render a certain kind of literary biography all but obsolete,” Blake Bailey, the author of a biography of Richard Yates and a forthcoming one of John Cheever, said. The messages are ”too ephemeral: people write them in a rush without the sort of precision and feeling that went into the traditional (and now utterly defunct) letter.”
It will be a daunting task to sift through the electronic archives of writers. Our art of literary greatness has subsided I believe through the quick e-mail. Misspellings, grammatical errors and the use of no punctuation plagues the e-mail system. If you’re a famous author or not, for the sake of prosperity and historical records, save and print those e-mails that touch your heart as if you walked to your mailbox and opened that letter from someone you waited so long to hear from.
Literary Letters, Lost in Cyberspace
