Lamenting the Loss of Written Correspondence

Lamenting the Loss Of Written Correspondence?

I have this sickening feeling that very soon…

--There will be fewer and fewer love letters found by playful granddaughters hidden in cracks of old desks.

--There will be fewer and fewer photos, dog-eared and stained by time, found tucked in the pages of a favorite book of poems.

--There will be fewer and fewer ratty old copies of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with notes scribbled in the margins and passages underlined and highlighted.

--We will lose great lines like:

I wake filled with thoughts of you. Your portrait and the intoxicating evening which we spent yesterday have left my senses in turmoil. Sweet, incomparable Josephine, what a strange effect you have on my heart!

... My soul aches with sorrow, and there can be no rest for you lover; but is there still more in store for me when, yielding to the profound feelings which overwhelm me, I draw from your lips, from your heart a love which consumes me with fire?

...Until then, mio dolce amor, a thousand kisses; but give me none , for they set my blood on fire…


Those lines are from a letter from Napoleon Bonaparte to his Josephine. It was never “published” in a book but survived only in her trove of letters. It, and thousands of others written by John Adams, William Shakespeare, Winston Churchill, Anton Chekhov, Lewis Carroll, the Brownings and so many more, are treasures that we are lucky to have. Again, they were never published, but endured thanks to the fact that they were written with great thought and love, and sent at great expense and then kept for generations. Those love letters along with political correspondence, diary and journal entries and written memos give us insight into the history of our world.

Now however we live in a wireless, paperless, disposable world. We live in a time when books are now wirelessly delivered to our Kindles and we e-bookmark those passages we like and move them to our virtual clipboard for future review…until we let the battery run out and lose them forever.

We live in a time when our picture frames hold over 1000 digital pictures that we can change monthly but we lose when the power is cut. The images are lost forever when our hard-drives are wiped clean by a magnet or when our computers are infected by a virtual virus…then they are quickly lost from our mind’s eye and are never passed on to others. They evaporate into the digital netherland.

We live in a time when there are no more “my soul aches with sorrow…” but instead we have disposable text messages like, ““OMG UR hot, c U soon”. Ahhhh, the way those words twitter in my head and make my heart flutter. How deeply personal and heartfelt.

So, are blogs like this one and e-mails like the hundreds we delete everyday the new mediums we should find ways to treasure? Should we occasionally be regressing and going back to a paper world? Should we print out our special e-mails? Maybe print those pictures that move us to tears or laughter. Perhaps we publish those blogs that mean something to us into a bound book, even if it’s for our eyes only?

Have you read Adams by McCullough? Or any of Sharra’s works? How about Mother Teresa’s posthumously published diary? Have you flipped through Jacob Riis’ photobooks? Or been enthralled by an Ansell Adams book? We know about our revolutionary foundations by those famous diaries of the founding fathers and mothers. We know of their true ideas and philosophies from their deeply considered love letters. We know of the horror of the Civil War by those millions of correspondence back to mom and dad from the brave and scared soldiers on the front line. We know of Mother Teresa’s faith and doubt from her meticulous diary entries.

How will we recreate your life? How will we know what you stand for and believe in and loved and cherished and were scared of? Will there be any permanent record of your heart and soul? Will those who follow after you know what you stood for and what you treasured?