Letters, in the Past Tense

There is so much to love in a letter. A letter is a treasure. A letter is a trinity--the simple precision of a pen across the ancient nap of paper to produce words, thoughts, emotions, hopes, fears, reflections, prayers, please and thank you, and wish you were here.

A letter is something to keep. I have thousands of them, boxes of them. My grandfather’s letters and my father’s letters and letters from those I have loved, befriended, berated, consoled--letters carrying every feeling we know, right here, with old postage stamps, faint traces of perfume, exotic addresses that beckon of adventure, sheets of paper that tell of struggle, of doom and, yes, of passion.

“The beautiful ... breath of life,” Goethe called the letter.

I have some of these letters spread on my workbench just now. A letter from my mother to her grandmother giving a child’s view of the Great Depression. Call it, Christmas without presents. A letter to my grandmother from a stranger telling how her son died while trying to save his crew in a burning B-29 in World War II. A yearning letter from my father to my mother far away, as he waited for a movie audition that did not come, but at least the weather was fine in California in 1949. A letter to me from an African friend saying that it was a good year to see the game on the Serengeti and I hadn’t forgotten him, had I? A letter from a third-grader addressed to me when I was covering the Gulf War, with the advice: “Get out of there, for God’s sake! Before you get killed.”

Personal letters survived the invention of the telephone. More recently, personal letters took on resurgent dignity as counterpoint to the frenzied photons of e-mail. But will personal letters survive terrorism? For once, I am not sure.

“What long letter?” a friend just replied in a rushed e-mail. “I ain’t opening no letters ... I look like a janitor in plastic gloves.”

For 20 years, Keith and I have supplemented our calls and e-mail jottings with letters. Long letters, intricate and entirely old-fashioned letters, sometimes embellished with drawings or collage--our private way of ratifying our friendship.

Every letter is intimate.

Did you receive an e-mail Valentine? A computer scanned holiday card? No soul there.

I remember meeting Nancy Andreasen at a fountain-pen store in Washington, D.C., a few years back. She was the editor of the American Journal of Psychiatry. She had to turn down 80% of the papers submitted to her for publication. She wrote her rejection letters by hand out of consideration for the feelings of those she had to disappoint.

Every letter is a labor, and that’s why letters are so valuable. “The great art,” Dickens said of letter-writing.

I became a journalist from the writing of letters. Letters taught me the power of words and the solemnness of the ritual of writing. This occurred in Vietnam, when I was assigned for a time to hospitals. Among my duties: I wrote letters for Marines who had been blinded or burned or crippled in battle and could not write themselves. Together we’d work into the night trying to get the words just right: “Dear Mom and Dad, I know you are worried sick but the doctors say ... “

I remained a journalist, at least in part, because of letters. They have been my 30-year connection to readers. There was never enough time to answer them all, but there always was time to read each one. Their wisdom, your wisdom, became mine. By your willingness to write, whether in argument or in affirmation, this work always seemed worth doing and striving to do better.

I’ve always saved the pleasure of reading letters for the end of the day. I can recall the flourish my grandfather employed in opening of a letter, and I try to emulate him. I retire to my chair and slit the envelope with a wooden blade carved from the branch of an African tree. With a letter before me, the world always seems more congenial. Every letter carries something of the person who wrote it.

But maybe I should put this all in the past tense. My recent letters have gone unanswered. Letters to me have gone unopened. People who moved the mail are dead now and others are sick. Mail rooms and post offices are quarantined.

One of many things that I have come to hate about those who terrorize is not only their disregard for life, but their attack on things that enhance life. They are barbarians to make the world so bleak.