The fate of letters
There's a difference between paper and bytes. Handwriting power. For email subscribers: BINGO resolutions!
If you’re a “follower” here’s some of what you didn’t get in your email:
My twenty-four New Year’s resolutions … and their BINGO card.
Ice in pipes, but no longer in the chickens’ water trough.
A good article to read in Harper’s about revision in its many forms. (Perfect for obsessive writers!)
Upcoming review of John Warner’s More Than Words: How to Think about Writing in the Age of AI (preorder from Bookshop)
You can fix it so you get the stuff you missed, too. Just subscribe below and you’ll get the next fuller versions of the posts. (Remember, it’s only another email.)
Alan Jacobs meets the Substack app:
I wanted to read a post from a Substack I’m not subscribed to, and I could read it for free if I downloaded the Substack app. So I did. After working my way through six screens of Substack either suggesting (Subscribe to these newsletters!) or demanding (Tell us your interests!) that I do something, I quit and deleted the app.
If you’re a follower or reading on the hapless app, you can fix all of that drama. Just subscribe and get an email.
The fate of letters
For a while after we were engaged, Bond Girl Bride and I lived on separate continents. International telephone calls were really expensive, and texting was non-existent. We wrote letters pretty much every day. I’d check my post box and she’d check her mailbox. We discovered that the letters clumped in transit, so some days meant no mail, and others delivered a bounty.
BGB kept every letter, and I recently saw them tucked in a file cabinet—a folder of light-weight airmail paper a couple inches thick. I lost her letters to my usual disarray and the rig-a-ma-roll of international transit, though I do remember that they were significantly more spicy than mine were to her.
![[title]The mighty pen[/title] Sir, I can attest to the power of handwriting (letters Dec 26, 28, 30 & 31). My husband of 62 years and four months died a year ago. He remained my beloved until the end but I found that I couldn't remember him as he was in his prime, which was distressing. During the Christmas break I found and reread for the first time the hundreds of letters we wrote to each other during our engagement: we lived in different countries, there was no internet, telephone was expensive and the post was cheap. It is wonderful therapy and a great comfort. I can hear and almost see him as he was then and I find myself falling in love with him all over again. Aude Fitzsimmons Girton, Cambridge](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd155cae1-a8e7-49b1-a2d8-9ae75589cc4d_1000x1194.jpeg "[title]The mighty pen[/title] Sir, I can attest to the power of handwriting (letters Dec 26, 28, 30 & 31). My husband of 62 years and four months died a year ago. He remained my beloved until the end but I found that I couldn't remember him as he was in his prime, which was distressing. During the Christmas break I found and reread for the first time the hundreds of letters we wrote to each other during our engagement: we lived in different countries, there was no internet, telephone was expensive and the post was cheap. It is wonderful therapy and a great comfort. I can hear and almost see him as he was then and I find myself falling in love with him all over again. Aude Fitzsimmons Girton, Cambridge")
Compared to Oliver Sacks’ correspondence, My letters to BGB in our closet are, well, even thinner than airmail paper. Sacks’ letter output is estimated at 200,000, filling seventy bankers boxes. That’s well over a hundred linear feet in storage. He wrote to his family and friends, collaborators, rivals, colleagues, and people he’d never met.
There was a time when epistolary output like Sacks’ was rare but not that remarkable. But I think A. J. Lees is right when he remarks in his review of Sacks’ Letters (ed. Kate Edgar) that “[w]riting literary letters has become a dying art, and it is possible that this collection might be the last of its kind involving a contemporary author.” Cynthia Ozick1 thinks along the same lines, but with the perspective of an historian in an essay published in Harper’s this month:
In the absence of private exchanges, what will happen to history? How will biography fare? What of the unwritten letters of persuasion that will have left no trace, letters of importuning gone unrecorded, letters of reprimand that never materialized: Letters that contain the might-have-been?
Will someone in the future read our emails like we read letters of our predecessors?
The November 2024 Harper’s Magazine opened with appreciations and remembrances of Lewis Lapham, the magazine’s former (and I believe the most esteemed) editor. The names make up a formidable contingent of the writers and thinkers around today—Annie Dillard, Ralph Nader, Francine Prose, Marilynne Robinson, to name a few. That was all heart-warming and quite a tribute to Lapham, but I was especially interested in the recollection of Lewis Lapham from Harper’s publisher John MacArthur, specifically his recounting of Lapham’s correspondence with Henry Kissinger.
It wasn’t just the words that made the impression on me. It was the medium: typescript on paper or a real carbon-copy, often with handwritten scrawl in a corner, signed in pen by the letter’s author.
Of course, many of my readers of a certain age still recall the process of letter-writing, as opposed to today’s email messaging. It was a drawn out affair that inadvertently focused many of us on the craft of words, perhaps simply because the process was slow, at least relative to today’s frantic tapping at keyboards. For a while, our letters continued to clatter from the computer keyboard but ended up spurting out of the inkjet or laser printer on real paper and then were fetched, folded, enveloped, stamped, and mailed. Paper gathers our words in different ways than an email app allows—certainly in more leisurely and possibly more thoughtful ways.
At least that’s the way I think about real paper letters.
MacArthur’s tribute to Lapham particularly focuses on letters Kissinger and Lapham exchanged in 1979-1980, most of them concerning a Harper’s review of Kissinger’s memoir White House Years (1979). The review was written by William Shawcross, one of Kissinger’s most acerbic and cogent critics about whom, as Lapham noted, Kissinger had “expressed feelings of revulsion and distrust.”
Lapham and Kissinger got together for lunch and breakfast on occasion, and their correspondence during the period was pretty testy, but also seemed to have a glaze of civility or something like it. (I think that impression arose from the formal qualities of letter-writing at the time.). I especially took note of Lapham’s final letter to Kissinger, sent after Kissinger had complained that Shawcross’ criticisms were personally hurtful, ad hominem, and “beyond the limits of decency.” In his long-researched review, Shawcross accused Kissinger, along with Richard Nixon, of committing war crimes.
Lapham’s response to Kissinger (November 24, 1980) brought his knowledge of history and learning to bear. He reminded Kissinger of
Machiavelli’s distinction between the morality of the city and the morality of the soul. As a National Security Advisor or Secretary of State you have no choice but to make decisions, many of them undoubtedly ambiguous or unpleasant, according to the morality of the city, but then you ask to be judged according to the morality of the soul. How then could I, or anyone else, possibly satisfy you?
Lapham invoking Machiavelli stopped me short.
When in my own electronic bits and bytes had I ever brought in Machiavelli or, for that matter, much relied on the reading and study I had done in “classics”? When had my own learning ever made its way into the business of email?
“Time-based” and “space-based” media in culture
I think there’s something about paper and pen … or typewriter, I guess.
Nicholas Carr’s “The Tyranny of Now,” recently published in The New Atlantis, builds from a sentence from Canadian political economist and media theorist Harold Innis: “Enormous improvements in communication have made understanding more difficult.” Innis characterized some media as primarily “space-based” and others as “time-based” in the book where the sentence appears, The Bias of Communication (1951).
“What Innis saw is that some media are particularly good at transporting information across space, while others are particularly good at transporting it through time,” Carr writes. “Some are space-biased while others are time-biased. Each medium’s temporal or spatial emphasis stems from its material qualities.” And, following Innis, Carr relates these general media characteristics to society and culture: “Because every society organizes and sustains itself through acts of communication, the material biases of media do more than determine how long messages last or how far they reach. They play an important role in shaping a society’s size, form, and character—and ultimately its fate.”
In general, email communication is “space-based,” capable of broad and quick transmission, and letters, as wispy as they might be on airmail paper, are comparatively “time-based,” the medium of paper permitting simpler preservation and storage over time (at least in comparison with email).2 And, of course, time is the stuff of history. If space-based media loosens the stabilizing and preserving qualities of time-based media, purposes of historians and archivists will suffer. As Harold Innis wrote, “Enormous improvements in communication have made understanding more difficult.”
And so, I wonder: Has email technology so channeled texts that they consist of little more than directives or the dry give-and-take of business? Will our emails be worthy of collection and curation, as so many letters of past correspondents have been worthy?
Email is tough as a time-based medium, since it presents tough technical challenges to archivists. Besides that, I do wonder whether literary and historically noteworthy qualities degrade in emails—that is, are they just less interesting and useful for the longer term?
Tags: letter-writing, curation, post, mail, paper, correspondence, handwriting
Links, cited and not, some just interesting
An interesting article contrasting kinds of media, with some relevance to distinguishing characteristics of pen-and-paper letters and electronic email. Carr, Nicholas. “The Tyranny of Now.” The New Atlantis, Winter 2025. https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-tyranny-of-now.
A review of Oliver Sacks’ Letters. (Paywalled.) (I think I need to read this very long book, too!) Lees, A J. “Men, Minds & Motorcycles.” Literary Review, December 2024. https://literaryreview.co.uk/men-minds-motorcycles.
There are people in the world who want to rescue letter writing. They’ve even organized themselves: “Organisations—The Handwritten Letter Appreciation Society,” February 9, 2024. https://thehandwrittenletterappreciationsociety.org/category/organisations.
“Before Penpalooza, my mail was mostly bills, junk mail and solicitations, and now my mailbox is the most fun place in my life.” An interview with Rachel Syme, co-founder of Penpalooza, a penpal matching service. Syme is also a staff writer at The New Yorker and has a book appearing in February. Cooper, Sabrina. “Penpalooza, the Global Pen Pal Project Soothing Lockdown Loneliness.” AnOther, January 19, 2021. https://www.anothermag.com/design-living/13055/penpalooza-the-global-pen-pal-project-soothing-lockdown-loneliness-rachel-syme.
A meditation on letters. Ozick, Cynthia. “Voices from the Dead Letter Office: On the Epistolary Life.” Harper’s Magazine. https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/voices-from-the-dead-letter-office-cynthia-ozick-epistolary-life/.
Ozick is 96 years old and is known for her fiction. I ran across this in her Wikipedia entry: “She appears briefly in the film Town Bloody Hall, where she asks Norman Mailer, ‘in Advertisements for Myself you said, quote, “A good novelist can do without everything but the remnant of his balls.” For years and years I've been wondering, Mr. Mailer, when you dip your balls in ink, what color ink is it?’.” The citation in the entry leads to a paywalled article in the Times Literary Supplement.
Carr probably wouldn’t settle for this gross distinction of email and letters and neither would Innis. After all, emails can be stored and preserved, though the infrastructure is complex. Carr’s article notes that business behaviors among platforms and web search (Google), have shifted the emphasis of Internet-enabled communications. In effect their business interests—and now, a culture of “users” habituated to to the immediate and the fresh—have narrowed to near zero the duration of information. Also, the interactive and physical qualities of electronic media encourage certain behaviors: “The screen interface, particularly in its now-dominant touch-sensitive form, beckons us to dismiss the old and summon the new—to click, swipe, and scroll; to update and refresh. If the printed book was a technology of inscription, the screen is a technology of erasure.”