I recently received a catalogue in the mail from a stationary company. I am surprised that they are still in business. Who sits down and writes letters anymore?
I think of my grandmother at her desk in the living room, a box of Eaton deckle-edged stationery in light grey at her elbow as she carefully wrote letters to her friends and family around the world. When I got married it became my job to write to the two sets of parents about our lives, especially when we lived out of the country. I was less formal as I typed out my letters trading the carbon copy back and forth between the two sets of parents. When my husband was in Vietnam I wrote to him every day, not knowing when the paper missives would reach him, as they sometimes took weeks. When our middle child was born while he was gone, I waited impatiently for weeks until I got a letter than said he had the news, and the event became completely real.
While doing research for the biography of my grandfather, there were boxes of letters to and from my grandparents at the Marine Corps archives in Quantico, Virginia. I read every one as they were a wonderful trip back to another era. These were written at the time events happened, not remembered later through the softening and blurring of years. I read about their courtship, their early married life, the tour in France at the Ecole de Guerre, and, of course, letters to and from the front during two wars.
Today, even if one saved every email and text one wrote, which would never happen, it would still not supply the record of lives lived that these letters provided. From my own experience I know that one writes with care and deliberation in a letter that is completely lacking in a text or email. When all biographies begin to be of people in this post letter writing era will they have the same accuracy as to what that person really thought and did? I do not know how they can.
On my part. I saved letters as well. I kept the correspondence from my husband while he was in Vietnam, and he kept mine as well. They sat for a number of years neatly filed in my desk drawer until one day we looked at one another and into the trash they went. Was there value in those written thoughts of two twenty somethings? I do not really know. All I remember now is the subtle feeling of relief that swept over me as they left our house. Now, half a century later, I still have no regrets. This is a notice to biographers everywhere, you will have to look elsewhere for a subject.