To receive a handwritten letter is a beautiful event, and to write a letter to a friend, a relative, or a loved one is an act of gracious recognition and respect, especially if one writes on good paper with pen and ink.
I am reminded of Alexander (Sasha) Barantschik, the the concertmaster of the San Francisco Sympnony, and of his words. My bassist son Charles tells me that Sasha says a document is worthless if it isn't handwritten on paper with pen and ink. This is irrevocably true even though the nouveaux of the present electronic world tell you otherwise. Emails have their place, but they are never a substitute for a real letter. Emails are the junk food of our non-caring, egocentric, disaffected times. At best they are utilitarian and fast, at the worst cold.
Can you imagine Obama or Putin doing a signing on an email, for the affordable care act, or, for the annexation of Crimea? How many times have you seen these two leaders on TV signing those documents, and with expensive pens? And what about signing a marriage document? The Mexicans sign it on the altar! Think of how many times you had to sign for your house mortgage, and with a pen. I still have mine.
Like Charles Krauthammer, I remember, when I was seventeen, the letters from my girfriends written in a sweet feminine hand, on pastel paper, containing some real or imagined subtle scent of their beings. Nothing of the electronic age can come even close to that.
I received , the other day, a letter from my daughter who is studying art in Adis Abiba, Ethiopa. She enclosed a single leaf of an indigenous Ethiopian tree--dryed, brown, and flattened out--yet when I smelled it there was a fleeting, ephemeral scent of Africa! Volumes were spoken to me by this leaf, and it opened a new botanical world for me. It sent me to my botanical reference works.
The tree, Kosso in Amharic, Hagenia abyssinica or African redwood, grows throughout most of Africa, even down to Congo.
Oh, and I must add, that Marianna wrote her letter to me from Adis Abiba in ink, and before the ink dryed she had inadvertently touched a word and left her partially smudged fingerprint on the paper. I have seen similar fingerprints several times on thousands of years old ancient pottery and on some paintings too. Is there a similarity between finger prints and the written word. Take a look at the whorls on your finger tips; they look like writing. Did writing evolve from finger marks and finger prints? Then, there is the parable of Jesus writing in the sand with his finger. Fingers create the identifying signiture, and the California DMV certainly thinks so as well.
Many years ago, my father sent me a tiny sprig of Spanish moss in a letter; that sprig has grown thirty years later now into a thriving drapery beneath my trees in a corridor of grey-green ambiance, reminding me daily of my father and his great love of plants. One cannot send seeds, plantlets, or cuttings by email.
May I be so brash in an inqusitive avuncular manner to ask how many people will "peg off" having never written or received a real letter? And, do not forget that letters are more permanent than emails. Real letters are of material substance. There are in the Amherst, Massachusetts library precious tiny bits and pieces of envelopes written on by Emily Dickinson. They are called "The Gorgeous Nothings" (Dickinson's own name for them) and have now been collected in a book by that same mysterious name, edited by Christine Burgin and published by New Directions. To see them and read the snippits of poetry on them gives an uncanny view of her presnce. I wonder what it would be like to touch them? Among these "nothings" is a tiny pencil stub she once sent to a friend who was tardy in writing to her. How witty.
Emails are ephemeral, fugacious. Where do they exist? Out there in abstract space somewhere? Letters are the blooded-cryptic-code of real human beings. I love to see the ink (green, blue, black, or brown) from a pen nib flow quiveringly down onto paper with my own intentionality to be sent to another human being. We say, "I don't have time for that. Please tell me,what do we have time for?"
