The Death of Correspondence

My Sweet Girl,
... I never knew before what such a love as you have made me feel was. I did not believe in it; my fancy was afraid of it, lest it should burn me up. But if you will fully love me, though there may be some fire, 'twill not be more that we can bear....

Keats to Fanny Brawne, July 10, 1819


We are gathered here today, ladies and gentlemen, to mourn the death of written correspondence. What for centuries was a time honored tradition for communicating events, wishes, hopes, prayers, and unrelenting love, has now become a page of history. The epistolary arts have perished on the altar of the text message.

And, what a shame! There is nothing much more beautiful than receiving a handwritten love letter, studying your paramour’s penmanship, tracing curving letters and smiling at misspellings. Written letters represent a bygone fantasy of true hearts and noble intentions, even if, a la James Joyce, these intentions are scandalously naughty. A clever letter through the post gets saved as a treasured memory next to carefully dried flowers and a nearly empty bottle of perfume. Yet, the same missive in a cold and uniform email oft ends up in the spam folder before vanishing into internet ether.

So powerful a medium are they that great novels have been written as letters alone, most notably Les Liaisons Dangerouses (Dangerous Liaisons) by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Goethe’s Die Leidden des jungen Werther (The Sorrows of Young Werther), and, of course, Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Unhappily, today we are saddled with the depressing modern equivalent: books, such as young adult author Lauren Myracle's TTLY, that tell stories solely through instant messaging, complete with headache-inducing emoticons and abysmal abbreviations.

And what of collections of intriguing famous correspondences, such as those between Henry Miller and Anais Nin, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, to name a few? Will the Twenty-first century version be a collection of barely-legible Tweets? While convenient and quick, e-communication leaves something to be desired when employed for any messages meant to covey great ideas or emotions. Truly, the handwritten note is the only written form suitable to honest wooing -- even the most futuristic of ladies being uninterested in undying devotion summed up in 140 characters or less.

In a wicked world where all we find in our mailboxes are bills, let us take a moment of silence to remember written correspondence, and, perhaps, if our fingers are still flexible enough, grab a pen and jot a note, amorous or otherwise, to one we shan't like to forget, in turn allowing, hopefully, that the letter may be merely sleeping, existing on and on like past poets' fragile hearts.




Photos: author Clarice Lispector; Dangerous Liasions (1988) film; author Anais Nin

"One day Desnos and others were taken away from their barracks. The prisoners rode on the back of a flatbed truck; they knew the truck was going to the gas chamber; no one spoke. Soon they arrived and the guards ordered them off the truck. When they began to move toward the gas chamber, suddenly Desnos jumped out of line and grabbed the hand of the woman in front of him. He was animated and he began to read her palm. The forecast was good: a long life, many grandchildren, abundant joy. A person nearby offered his palm to Desnos. Here, too, Desnos foresaw a long life filled with happiness and success. The other prisoners came to life, eagerly thrusting their palms toward Desnos and, in each case, he foresaw long and joyous lives.

The guards became visibly disoriented. Minutes before they were on a routine mission the outcome of which seemed inevitable, but now they became tentative in their movements. Desnos was so effective in creating a new reality that the guards were unable to go through with the executions. They ordered the prisoners back onto the truck and took them back to the barracks. Desnos never was executed. Through the power of imagination, he saved his own life and the lives of others."

Susan Griffin on poet Robert Desnos, referring to his detainment in the Terezin concentration camp during WWII for working with the French Resistance.

Photo: young Desnos