Cries like Dead Letters Sent
Robert L. Fisher
2015
Perhaps you have had this experience: quite by chance in an attic or
neglected corner of a walk-in closet you come across, likely in a shoebox, a bundle
of old letters, possibly secured with ribbon or rubber bands, bearing your
handwriting and the distinctive red stripes of airmail envelopes.
A few years ago when I visited an old friend in Albuquerque, New Mexico,
he showed me just such a bundle of airmail letters from me. I could not bear to
untie them, take them from their light envelopes and read them. We were
roommates when I was in graduate school and he was in medical school. We
always kept in touch no matter where we wound up.
I felt as if I would be reading the thoughts, opinions and emotions of a much
less experienced, much more naïve and shallow person, much as we might feel
when looking at old photos of various awkward, starry-eyed stages of our youth ―
those clothes, hair, glasses, bell-bottom pants and huge collars. It would be like
looking at our hominid ancestors, hairy, small and holding stone tools.
Quite aside from the content of the letters, what overwhelmed me was how
letter writing and stationery have gone the way of the horse and buggy and the
steam engine.
For example, do you remember onion skin paper, so perfectly named, light
as a woman’s kiss blown from the rail of an ocean liner to her lover below on the
dock. The ink was just as legible from either side of the translucent film. Then
there were the stamps, a whole universe of philately. Like many children I had a
stamp collection. I never cared for filling in the gaps in the stamp album ― all the
denominations for a particular issue. Rather I was fascinated by the languages,
writing systems ― the alphabets of Europe with their busy accent marks, the
strangeness of Greek and Russian, the mystery of Arabic and the totally opaque
squiggles of Chinese. The pictures on the stamps, usually engravings, were
glimpses of impossibly remote lands ― sailing ships, dhows and junks; pyramids,
temples, cathedrals; birds from the Arctic, shorebirds, gulls, eagles, songbirds and
jungle birds like parrots and toucans; kings wearing crowns and some with fezzes
― just enough of a peek at exotic realms to whet one’s curiosity.
I remember most vividly the aerograms, those single sheets of thin paper,
usually grey or blue, on one side of which you crammed in your message, even
writing vertically in margins or around edges, then folded the sheet along the
dotted lines and sealed the various tabs on the top and sides of the sheet. The
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stamp, usually dull as dishwater, was printed on the paper and was included in the
price. All you had to do was address it, and drop it in a mailbox.
Aerograms were the cheapest means of keeping alive friendships over vast
distances. One of my friends would send aerograms from Turkey and I would see
the word uçakla stamped here and there on the envelope ― uç means ‘fly’, uçak
‘airplane’, -la (or ile) ‘by means of’.
One time I lived in
Macao, when it was still a
Portuguese colony, and
would use a bilhete cartaavião (aerogram). The
Portuguese aerogram has
an interesting history:
first, it was invented and
patented by one of
Portugal’s strangest and
most original authors,
Fernando Pessoa. Outside
the Café Brasileira in Lisbon there is a bronze statue of Pessoa, one leg crossed
over the other, his armed raised to emphasize a point. He was an habitué of the
haunts of Portuguese poets, writers, playwrights, artists and intellectuals of the
early twentieth century.
Second, it was devised as a
means of facilitating
communication between
colonists, colonial officials and
the military of Portugal’s farflung seaborne empire and the
metropolitan homeland. Much
the same is true of British,
French and Italian aerograms.
The first British aerograms, for
example, were issued in Iraq in
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1933 (in fact, Roald Dahl was an RAF fighter pilot stationed near Baghdad in
1940).
Only a few nations still issue aerograms ― the former Portuguese colony of
Angola is one of them ―, while others, like Australia, only issue them once a year,
typically at Christmas.
Aerograms are a legitimate branch of philately, with their collectors,
historians and experts.
Aside from the physical materials of letter writing is, of course, the tradition
of expressing oneself, often at considerable length, in writing. Many pioneering
scientists such as Charles Darwin and Alexander von Humboldt were gifted
narrators of their extensive discoveries as naturalists, and of their exploratory
expeditions in South America, Africa and Asia. These scientists wrote with
posterity in mind and with an eye to future publication in book form.
Two of the greatest letter writers, both in quantity and quality, are French:
Madame de Sévigné (1626 – 1696) and Volatire (1694 – 1778). Madame de
Sévigné’s correspondence is the result of the simple fact that her daughter
married and move away to Provence, a very long way from Paris in the 17th
century. Madame de Sévigné carried on a thirty-year correspondence with her
daughter, some 1120 surviving letters (sadly, many of the letters were destroyed
after reading). She knew everyone at court from the Sun King himself to Colbert,
and was a most amusing reporter of court intrigues and jealousies. She was close
friends with La Rochefoucauld, and she describes a performance of Racine’s
Esther at Saint-Cyr.
This world of stamps, stationery and aerograms has vanished like morning
mist driven away by the rising sun, and about as quickly. The advent, first of email and then of texting, has all but obliterated the art of letter writing. E-mail has
always had about it the feeling of something disposable, like a memo on where
employees are allowed to park their cars. One often uses the reply function, or
simply deletes the original.
Texting is limited to 160 characters and thus abounds in abbreviations like
LOL. Here literary merit is no more valued than musicianship in rap or hip-hop.
Whatever.
It is a special joy to receive a handwritten letter, no matter how brief. The
only one who still sends them to me is my mentor from graduate school, now 82. I
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am thrilled when I see his beautiful handwriting on the envelope, that confident,
graceful penmanship of another era.
We have lost something beautiful and humane.
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