Lacy WrightRECALL THE excitement you used to feel when the mail came? It was possible that you might get a letter from someone special that you were hoping to hear from. Or that, unexpectedly, you might receive a message from a long-lost friend.
That was then. Now, I find only bills and advertising in my mailbox. The latter, for good reason, is called "junk mail."
I was reminded again of the demise of the letter by V.S. Naipaul's Between Father and Son, the collected correspondence of Naipaul, his father, and others in his family after Naipaul went to Oxford in 1949. The length and frequency of their letters seem remarkable today. In the space of eight years, there are enough of them left to fill a 287-page book.
And their letters are not just about the weather. Their communication included Naipaul's complaints about people he had met (like the young Gloria Escoffery), his father's advice about how to get poetry into the Trinidad Guardian, frequent references to money problems, and almost everything that was going on in the lives of those talented, determined people.
We forget today how normal that exchange was. If people separated by an ocean wanted to stay in touch in the 1950s, there was no alternative. The telephone was both unreliable and far too expensive for routine use.
Today, cheap telephone calls and nearly-free electronic mail sent via the Internet have largely condemned the letter to oblivion. E-mail is a marvellous advance, but the changes in language use that it has introduced terseness to the point that punctuation, and nuance, disappear have deprived this medium of its potential. Although nothing prevents an e-mail from conveying a real letter, it rarely does.
Phone calls don't measure up either. A letter says exactly what you want to say in the best way you can say it. The writer can review and improve on his message before it is sent. And the addressee can read appealing passages over and over. Phone conversations rarely achieve the same intensity, tending to degenerate into long meanderings about trivia.
But, you say, you're just too busy to write. What about Naipaul, a colonial struggling to succeed at the metropole's greatest university, and his father, working day and night to support a large family? And what about Herbert Asquith, England's Prime Minister during the First World War, who somehow found the time, at the height of the most devastating conflict the world had yet known, to write letters to friends practically every day, as described by Roy Jenkins, his biographer.
No, it's not a matter of time, but of priorities. We think we have more important things to do, like watch television, than write to our family and friends.
I doubt it. When one reads the letters home from young World War II soldiers who never returned, one sees writing with the power to speak down the decades. Those of us who want our words and thoughts to outlive us should take advantage of this vanishing medium. It is there if we wish to use it.
Lacy Wright was Deputy Chief of Mission at the US Embassy in Kingston and acted as Ambassador in 1993-94. He can be reached at LacyWrightcox.net
