About a month ago, when my older cousin told me and my father that he had something to show us, I wasn’t sure what to expect. He came back into the room holding a long, green box, brimming with letters bearing the sepia tint of age. I sifted through them and realized they were letters exchanged by my grandmother and grandfather during World War II, as they struggled to maintain their relationship thousands of miles apart.
I never knew my grandfather. He survived the war, but lost both his legs. My family describes him as a true hero, telling stories of his strength, confidence and courage. Although he died well before I was born, I’ve imagined countless times what he must have been like.
But never have I felt so close to him as I did when I held those letters.
His handwriting was beautiful, flowing gracefully in pencil across the delicate, brown paper. I was struck by the idea that he had held this same piece of paper, more than 60 years earlier. He felt tangible and real for the very first time.
The power of a hand-written letter is frequently overlooked. Today, this beautiful, contemplative and very personal form of communication is often considered a lost or dying art. As the speed of life in the digital age reaches a break-neck pace, many find they have little time for their family and friends, let alone enough spare time to pick up a pen and write a real letter.
The instantaneity of e-mail has been hailed as an extraordinary innovation and it has certainly made communication much easier and faster. However, with the demise of the physical letter, we have lost a lot.
Letter writing takes a certain amount of foresight. Before hammering out the first thing that pops into your mind, you have to consider how you want to craft the sentence and then anticipate what you will write next. There are no backspaces in letter writing, no cut and paste function. It takes concentration, creativity and organization to make the first draft your best.
Hand-written letters also provide rare practice for penmanship, a skill that used to be valued so highly it was a major component of classroom lessons.
Today, some people struggle to read even their own handwriting. Similarly, with texting and e-mail lingo dominating today’s correspondence, we seem to have lost touch with proper grammar, spelling and punctuation. The apostrophe and comma have certainly been abused in the shift to digital communication.
As we continue to rely on our digital inboxes for news of family and friends, consequently, we are leaving fewer material traces behind.
Grandchildren, looking for pieces of their ancestors 60 years from now, may pick up a USB memory stick filled with e-mails and digital photos – this hardly seems as romantic and personal as a box filled with aged, hand-written letters.
Even that assumes today’s technology remains compatible over the next few decades. It wasn’t long ago that we were saving documents to floppy disks and now a computer that can read them is hard to come by.
In the end, there is no substitute for the permanence of the hand-written letter. Not only is it a personal and creative form of communication, but it’s important to keep in mind that we will only be remembered by what we leave behind.
The creativity and personality that jumped out of my grandfather’s letters will remain with me forever.