During winter break, I was aimlessly wandering the aisles of Target in my hometown with my friend. The mission was to look for the perfect lip gloss (shut up, it was a weeknight in New Hampshire), but she and I had wandered into the stationary aisle. She pointed out that I am nearly obsessed with stationary. I love it.
My new favorite addition to my stationary collection is a pack of note cards with bright pictures of flowers on them. On the inside, they say things like, “You’re so hot. There, now do you feel better?” and “You’re not unhappy with your life, you’re just annoyed that everyone around you is incompetent.”
As I was adding a lovely package of yellow and green striped Post-Its to my basket, my friend told me she recently found a pile of letters I had written her during the summer before our senior year of high school when she was in Maine doing a summer art program. She keeps them in a box in her apartment in Brooklyn, along with other random keepsakes. When I called her to ask her what I wrote about in those letters, she only said, “I don’t know, just stuff about you and your family and our friends and something stupid that Julie had said and funny things that happened to you at work. I don’t really remember specifically, but they were great.”
Because that’s the thing about letters – they are great. And they’re dying as an art form. But before you stop reading because you’re so bored with this topic (who writes about letters, anyway?), I’ll liken the letter as an art form to another medium that the less nerdy folk are most likely familiar with: the mix CD. The mix CD is intended for one specific listener or group of listeners. The perfect mix includes songs that make the listener feel that only he or she will appreciate those specific songs in that particular sequence.
I don’t know anyone who doesn’t love a good mix CD, and no matter how many people may insist that they’re just not letter writers, I don’t know anyone who doesn’t love a good letter. Because either way, it’s something that makes us feel special – it makes us realize that someone chose those particular songs for a specific reason, or that someone sat down and thought what exactly we’d like to hear about.
The fact that letters often just include simple news is what’s most interesting to me, especially in the context of our culture, in which we can gain any information immediately. My mother will write me notes about what everyone is doing at home, but I talk to my parents at least twice a week. She could relay this information to me over the phone, at which point we could have an actual conversation about it, but it’s not the same. I’ve been writing letters to my grandmother, and even though they’re just about the tedium of my days and weeks and information I could tell her over the phone or she could hear from my parents, she loves them.
Logically, here will arise the argument for email. And I will not protest. I love email. But to me, while email is fun, it’s not as personal as a letter. Email allows for multitasking, and multitasking diminishes our attention span per task. It just doesn’t require the same amount of attention as sitting down to write a letter requires.
Most people I know, myself included, save letters they have received. I’ll refer you to the Seinfeld episode in which Jerry upsets the woman he’s dating by throwing away her carefully written thank you note seconds after he reads it in front of her. She is outraged, but he proves to her that even he, Jerry Seinfeld, saves some letters, as he shows her a fistful of his Nana’s old birthday cards. Who saves emails? Emails, even when saved on a disk or hard drive or printed out, accrue no sentimental value. I have a letter from my friend who lives in Brooklyn, written in the fall of 2001, where she has doodled stars and song lyrics in the margins. it’s not possible to add character to an email in the same way as in a letter.
In 1964, media theorist Marshall McLuhan wrote in his book Understanding Media, that “the medium is the message.” He theorized that there are “hot” and “cool” media through which we interact and gain information. Had McLuhan lived to see the fruition of the internet, he would’ve labeled it a “cool” medium, because our computer screens create a barrier to the kind of whole and devout interaction that a printed text does not. He once said that, “People don’t actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath.”
I’m with Mr. McLuhan on this one. Give me something that I can touch, handwriting that I have to figure out and something intended for only me. And to those of you who disagree, I simply say: Write me.
Allison Keiley, a senior in the College of Communication, is a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press.