Growing up, one requirement in the English Language classes included learning to write a letter. It could be a letter to a friend, relative or parent and would oft consist describing perhaps telling your favourite aunt in Europe about your summer holidays or thanking your uncle for the wonderful birthday present they’d mailed. It wasn’t my preferred writing exercise, much less if it was as an exam question but it was fun to a certain extent. Not to mention, you learned something from it— for instance, I know now that you always write your address on the right at the top of the page before starting the letter. Also, some novels have been written in an epistolary format, my favourite being Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Today, I wonder if children are still taught to write letters. Or even a proper email, at least. Because you see, the truth is: the art of letter writing is dead. Or at any rate, dying.
Maybe it is still taught as a small module in the English Language syllabus, I cannot say. But the advancements in technology and the ease of real-time communication through Skype, Viber, Whatsapp and more has condemned letter writing to the slow walk down to the gallows of extinction. I can’t claim to remember eagerly waiting by the letter-box in the hopes of receiving a communiqué from a loved one in some far-off land but I do recall how nice it felt to receive a birthday card if that person lived in a different continent. Nowadays, we might drop a text or even call them up to wish in person.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s great that distance no longer hinders keeping in touch with people even if they’re halfway across the world where it doesn’t take forever to hear from them.
But this development feels a little hollow and empty.
I’m a bit of a sentimentalist at heart and I do believe the art of not only writing a letter but the very act of sending it has a dab of what I like to refer to as “old-fashioned magic”, by which I mean it tends to conjure a strange mix of warm feelings partly nostalgic and comforting possibly accompanied by the rich scent of pinewood shavings, emotions of goodness that fill you up from head-to-toe the way a cup of hot chocolate will do on a cold night when you’re curled up with a book. Letter writing creates an invisible link of intimacy and it does not have to necessarily refer to the romantic kind of intimacy, either. This bond is primarily formed out of an unspoken understanding that letter writing is not an easy task for it takes time to compose and mail and even then it could still get lost travelling from sender to receiver. When it reaches its destination and is delivered, it is made implicitly clear that the writer evidently thought and cared a great deal to make such an effort and endeavour.
Did any of you have a pen pal growing up? Letter writing advocated this frenzy. Sadly, I didn’t but I do know they were popular. This meeting of strangers, their only form of contact being through this communication, was the pen-on-paper equivalent of how one might meet strangers on the Internet— except we’re cautioned against doing so owing to the rise of unwanted nuisances such as pedophiles, perverts and a whole bunch of unsavoury characters prowling the cyberspace. Pen-pals allowed two individuals from varied backgrounds to exchange cultural information and I’m guessing sometimes they even met up eventually. That must have been fun. Ask your parents about it, I’m quite certain they may have had a pen pal growing up.
It isn’t too late. We can still keep that magic alive. Don’t believe me? Try writing someone a letter and see how they react. I guarantee that it will be very happy— unless you wrote incredibly nasty stuff in it.
The Snarky Quill 