Under the Raydar — 4/14/11

Historians have depended on our letters — the letters of heroes, friends, soldiers and kings — to rewrite the past. Battles, love stories, discoveries can be traced, all through intimate letters left behind. It has been said that the cultural shift from letter writing to an era of empty mailboxes and buzzing phones is growing to be so extreme that one day historians may not divide time just by B.C. and A.D., but between when people wrote letters and when they did not.

Yes — we text, we make YouTube videos, we update our Facebook statuses to record our own personal histories … but how will this document our time when it is deleted so quickly, or posted so shallowly? What is missing is what we truly think about our time, and how we tell about it — not to an impersonal viral community, but to a friend, a sister, a loved one.

Beyond documenting our time, letters truly document our “essential selves,” as one writer puts it. Thinking in a letter about what exactly we want to say to our correspondent and how exactly we want to say it catalogues our history of self, our ideas about who we really are, what truly matters. Texts can be deleted in an instant — if they aren’t automatically — and something about the always-disappearing-nature of this history we are scripting makes me sad, regretful and nostalgic for a time that didn’t even belong to me.

I want to write letters again.

I’ve been thinking about this for a variety of reasons.

Whenever it starts to turn into springtime, I think about letters. I work as the program director at a summer camp that I attended as a counselor and as a camper. In a place free from technology, letter writing is a special and frequently acted task. It is also a tradition that at the end of the summer, the boys’ and girls’ staff make each other gifts. Last summer, the girls’ and boys’ staff members decided the gifts would be letters: all 120 staff members sat up at nighttime writing letters to each of the other members. We filled little boxes with letters, and on the last day, we each received our own box full of letters.
I remember standing outside of my office, looking out at the main lawn that day, seeing everyone just reading letters. Some were smiling, some crying, some just sitting and looking out at the lake and remembering. I remember, in reading my own, how much I learned and saw beyond the words.

There is so much we can say in a letter; we can say I’m sorry, I love you, I forgive you, I wish that I had known you better.

The other day, I checked my mail (which I always forget to do), and I had received a letter from another senior — someone who I have always enjoyed talking to, but to whom I have never gotten as close as I wished. She had written me a letter about my last column, and also just expressed how she wished that we had become better friends. Upon receiving the letter, I was surprised and happy. I felt exactly the same way — I could have written the same things to her, but the difference is that she actually did: she said what she thought and made my day in the process. I am really grateful to her for what she said, but more than that, for who she is and for her ability to articulate what she really means — it is something I’ve too often forgotten to do, or just assumed was understood.

I want to write again, maybe before we leave here, to say what I have always assumed was known. Maybe after graduation, I will turn off Skype more frequently, and turn instead to a simple pen and paper. I want to write, not just for history’s sake, not for the sake of finding my essential self, but because there are few better feelings than saying what you really mean, or than hearing what someone really wants to say.  There is no way to delete that feeling.