"Mail - Missing are Letters"

Astute readers will recall that I wrote a similar essay a year ago, entitled “The Lost Art of Writing Letters.” But this is a subject that bears repetition.

 

Here in Essex we are having another beautiful late summer day.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“Mail – Missing are Letters!”

September 14, 2024

 

“In an age like ours, which is not given to letter writing, we

forget what an important part it used to play in people’s lives.”

                                                                                              attributed to Anatole Broyard (1920-1990)

                                                                                              literary critic and editor, The New York Times

 

Personal letters are as rare as a Woody Allen smile. I love letters, but, sadly, I don’t often write them and even less frequently receive them. I have hordes of old family letters and once edited a book, Dear Mary, which consisted of letters between my parents during the Second World War. I do have copies of letters written to each of my ten grandchildren on their tenth birthdays. I have a collection of E. B. White’s letters and Philip Stanhope’s (Lord Chesterfield) Letters. I have framed letters from Noah Webster, Harriet Beecher Stowe, T.S. Eliot, Gideon Welles, and P.G. Wodehouse, reflecting bygone eras. This absence of letters saddens me. They once played a big role in my life, and I am sure in yours.

 

Recently, when I stopped by the mailroom the pickings were typical – a couple of bills, two requests for money, an unwanted catalogue, and a statement. The bills were put aside, the statement filed, the catalogue recycled, and one of the requests was tabled. The other was shredded. There were no letters, not even a postcard. Going to the mailbox has lost the breathless anticipation I remember from my youth.

 

In boarding school, opening my mailbox was fraught with emotion. Would anything be there? It was thrilling if the envelope had the cursive handwriting that only a fifteen-year-old girl could master – a girl met the previous summer, or at a dance with a sister school – a girl whom I would have liked to call a girlfriend, but I was too shy. More often the envelope bore my mother’s distinctive handwriting, with a message admonishing me to study hard and stay out of trouble. Those of us who served in the armed forces remember the excitement of mail call – We would gather around the corporal who dispensed the mail. Names were called. There were days – perhaps most – when I retreated to my bunk empty-handed. On others, I was happy. Since I had met the girl who is now my wife, it was her letters I cherished. 

 

I have always liked letters. They offer a snapshot of the author. Tucked away, my wife and I have letters from our parents and grandparents. They help us better understand them. Letters were once inherent to our culture. Twenty-one of the twenty-seven books in the New Testament are epistles or letters. The Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium is a collection of 124 letters by the Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger, written toward the end of his life in 65AD. But letters are rare in this internet age – e-mail, social media posts, and texts have taken their place. Some argue that the telephone, or even the telegraph, foretold the end of letters. 

 

That may be true, but if so their death was prolonged. My parents and grandparents communicated primarily by mail. A sister who died twenty-seven years ago was known as “the last of the letter writers.” But now the end seems to be finally here. In his poem “Birches,” Robert Frost ended with this line: “One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.” One could do worse than be a writer of letters. Someone will be happy.