I watched Becoming Jane last night, a beautiful movie which Mary gave me as an early birthday present (and aren’t I glad she did!). For those of you who aren’t familiar, Becoming Jane is a movie about Jane Austen’s life and how she came to be the great writer that she was, starring Anne Hathaway. I’m listening to the soundtrack right now, a beautiful set of songs which sound classical but… well, aren’t. What they are, though, is beautiful (you can listen to my favorite song from the movie here, if you so choose). It also woke up my more impulsive self, which is demanding that I move to the English countryside RIGHT NOW, or at the very least learn how to write in calligraphy and write five thousand letters to my friends using sealing wax and a fountain pen (did you know that Jane Austen’s handwriting was in the Bickman style of calligraphy? I researched it today when I finally accepted the fact that I couldn’t move to the English countryside anytime soon).
Yeah.
I’m not making this up.
I could get into a very, very, very long discussion about the themes in Becoming Jane, and then happily launch into a dissection of how the biographical events depicted in the movie affected her writing (the movie is historically accurate up to a point, so I could technically do that). But I’ll spare you, at least for now. Here’s my last word on the subject before I move on: watch Becoming Jane. I can’t make you, I know, but please at least consider it.
And that brings me to the vaguely related topic of letter-writing. I love writing letters, although I’m currently guilty of owing two letters to Haruhi, both of which are several months overdue… which says a lot about how dependable I am when it comes to writing letters… but which doesn’t change the fact that I love them. There’s something about receiving a letter that makes me so happy in a way that getting an email or a text message doesn’t. Also, when looking back on letters, you’ve got a chronological and easily organized trail to follow: all you have to do is keep the letters in the same place, either in a drawer or a box or even held together with a ribbon, and you’ll always have them.
If you want to read back through the old emails you exchanged with a certain person just to remember what the relationship was like, or to remember a particular event, or to see how much both of you have changed — good luck! That means frustrating attempts to find the relevant emails with the perfect keywords typed into your email’s search engine, and even then there’s the chance that you deleted one without meaning to. And text messages? Looking through text messages is the most frustrating thing in the world. Especially if you want to go back more than a month or two. Now, I’m not saying that text messaging and emailing are bad. Of course not! They have their place, and they have rendered the handwritten letter unnecessary, if you really want to argue that.
BUT.
Emails and text-messages are fast, temporary solutions to real communication. They usually deal in facts, at least in my experience. When was the last time you seriously thought about the words you were typing in an email? Read them over? Carefully considered the person, the meaning, what you’re trying to say, and the best way to say it? Now, I may be an anomaly, but I only think about those sorts of things when emailing important people (teachers, per se). But with my friends? I can’t remember the last time I proofread an email I sent to one of my close friends. I seriously can’t.
Once again, this may be only me, but when I sit down and write a letter on real paper, with a real pen, I end up writing about what’s important, or funny, or interesting in my life at that point in time. I also ask about theirs, genuinely curious about what’s going on in their life, what they think about something I mentioned, or some other little thing they talked about in their last letter. If I did that in an email, it would be called an “update” and I’d feel slightly self-absorbed writing such a thing. I also wouldn’t organize my thoughts or consider my words as much. But a letter makes me think.
This point has been brought up by other letter-writing advocates before, but emails and text messages (and Facebook messages, and anything else that is hailed as “instant”) always seem so urgent, too. They must be read, and responded to quickly, or else the recipient runs the risk of being deemed rude. With a letter, you don’t need to respond in two seconds, two hours, or two days. Now, it’d be nice if one responded to a letter within two days, but it’s not an urgent thing. One could reply in two weeks (or in my case, two months) without worrying about the message disappearing into the giant maw of cyberspace. A letter doesn’t beep, it doesn’t add to the number of “unread” things, but waits until there’s time. Time to think, time to reflect, time to seriously try and connect with another human being who’s not standing right next to you.
But time? Who actually has time?!
You see, that’s the problem. Email and text-messaging are wonderful because they are instant. They’re also awful because they’re instant. They give us the information we need right now, which means that we only focus on the moment right in front of us. Letters require time — time to write, time to send, time to get to the person we sent them to. But that means, implicitly, that letters can’t focus on the immediate present. We can’t ask people if they’re free on Tuesday in a letter (unless you sent it the Tuesday before), we can’t send someone tonight’s English homework in a letter, we can’t ask where someone will be in half an hour in a letter. Because we can’t ask or say these things, we’re forced to come up with other things to say in our letters — things that are meaningful, but which we rarely ever stop to consider in our daily lives because we tell ourselves that we simply don’t have the time. That is why letters are such gifts.
A letter is the gift of your time to someone else, showing that you care about them enough to pause for a little while, stop rushing from one thing to the next, and really try to connect with them.
And now I’ll stop waxing poetic about the letter, since this post is already well over a thousand words and while I could go on about how much I love letters until your ears fall off, I think I should leave your ears intact for the time being, yes? Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go write some overdue letters to Haruhi.
To send a letter is a good way to go somewhere without moving anything but your heart. ~Phyllis Theroux
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