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Letterature

by Brian Doyle

Digital connections can kindle uncommon relationships among kids, teachers, and the wider world. Yet, as important as these cyber-relationships can be, essayist Brian Doyle reminds us of the joys of exchanging letters through the post, those "papery handshakes" that endure across time and space.

To write or read a personal letter is to connect with someone you love or respect; it is affection and care parsed into words on the page; it is a papery handshake drawn with ink and sealed with the tongue of a friend. A letter arrives in the mailbox, where it waits decorously and silently for your hand to pull it forth. You sit, open it eagerly, read it with delight or despair, read it again, file it away, find it years later, read it a third time, treasure its yellowing ancient papery emotional power, history, preserved time. Rarely is a personal letter thrown away. They are uniformly saved, I suspect: in desk drawers, shoe boxes, between the pages of a book.

It is fashionable in these times to bemoan and bewail the Death of the Letter—killed, with the accompaniment of a braying laugh track, by television, video, and computers. But is this so? Just how many letters are written these days?

"Somewhere between 50 and 60 million 'real' letters are mailed in America every day," says U.S. Postal Service spokesman Lou Eberhardt. "Total United States mail is about 600 million pieces a day. On the whole planet there are approximately a billion and a half letters in daily circulation."

By Eberhardt's professional guess, then, about one in five Americans is sending or receiving an honest-to-God letter today. Not a bill, not a request, not a sale notice, but a real, live letter, with a salutation and a signature, with news, anecdotes, anniversary greetings, perhaps even a photograph of little Elwin covered with his birthday cake.

Every Wednesday for the past year I have appeared in a nearby third-grade class to talk about Writing and Editing and Letters and Stories. I gave many small amusing speeches about letters. Nearly every Wednesday a moppet would approach me and ask, in a small voice, "But what can I write a letter about?"

Here is what I wanted to tell those children:

Write about the vagaries of health and wealth, travel plans, anecdotes, tall tales, books read and movies seen, the odd and poignant behavior of parents, pets, and neighbors; quirks of the weather, tales of the city, the exuberance of birds, the waltzing of insects, the manner in which late afternoon sunlight stacks itself in golden bars on the rug, the stinging shout-note of a trumpet, the gravel-moan of a saxophone, the wisdom of water, the extraordinary dinner you had Tuesday, how Aunt Trudy successfully dealt with the problem of bats in the belfry, starlings in the eaves, death in the afternoon.

Anything. Everything. Letters, as tiny cries from the heart, are small cars in which both clowns and kings fit. Letters also bring the world to the door, hat in hand, polite and agreeable. I travel through the mails, keep in touch with various and sundry communities, feel tremors in the strings that connect me to the world. So many connections, worlds, circles of friends and family, work and play, past and present. The web woven by letters is dense and has a power far beyond its ingredients: ink, paper, a gummed stamp. Isn't the power and pleasure of a letter like that of love, in which the opening is thrilling, the process a labor of pleasure, and the memory savored long afterward?

A small child is still tugging at my pants-leg. "But what can I write about?" she asks.

What I write about:

How I always got a haircut after breaking up with a girlfriend. How my mother went back in the house for her forgotten gloves and returned to the porch to find my brother, one year old, suddenly dead in his stroller. How I once fouled out of a basketball game before halftime and walked two miles home in the snow, furious and ashamed. How I saw angels in the attic as a boy, their wings huge and muscular, their faces empty and terrible. How my father, lanky and young and in a war, wrote poems to my mother in the thick dusk of the Philippines. How my grandmother held her dead husband's name in her mouth for an extra second when she mentioned him. How my daughter gracefully holds out her left hand, palm up, greeting the water, when I carry her to the sea.

"Every letter written," said a medieval abbot, "is a wound inflicted on the devil." His point, I think, was that words are evanescent, and so are conversations; what lingers in the mind is only an impression of speech, a sense of having communed and communicated, an idea of what transpired between yourselves. The memory of a personal conversation is inevitably mostly fiction. Perhaps a phrase or an idea stands forth against the tide of lost words. Not so with a letter, in which words are preserved as if frozen in amber. That medieval abbot thought that letters were holy. I agree with him. They connect us in a most cordial fashion; they preserve the past, which had saints and angels and grace in it; they make us remember their authors, living and dead, and such memories are gentle prayers for those who sat down to write something of themselves.

There are times in my life when all the world seems intricately related, when my mind snaps open with the clear snicking sound of a lock unlocked, when all things seem both circular and humorous. It is on moments like these that my spiritual life depends, and I have learned to wait as patiently for them as I do for the train.

When they arrive I relish and remember them, and hurriedly scribble down the words they were dressed in, and stuff the scraps of paper in my pockets. Sometime later, when the world has stopped rushing by and no one expects me anywhere, I write them down and send them to the people I love and respect. I think of these stories, and the letters and postcards on which they are scribbled or hurriedly typed, as small prayers, bulletins from the universe, stray and telling notes from the Big Song. With care and affection I scrawl my name at the bottom, affix a stamp, and entrust the paper packet to the air and to the United States Post Office. And soon enough, from everywhere, letters come back to me, each one the written voice of its author, each one a prayer, each one a gift.

Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland and the author of several collections of essays, including Leaping: Revelations & Epiphanies. This article first appeared in Portland Magazine in 1992. It is adapted here by permission of the author.