Blame this on Zadie Smith. I was barely five pages into her classic On Beauty , which draws you in so thoroughly through a narrative told initially just with emails, and I was taken years back to a time when letters mattered. My earliest memories of reading letters are from a dusty book I stumbled on at my grandparents’ — C.S. Lewis’ Letters to Children . In it, as a 10-year-old, I discovered the strangest thing: authors were real people. I’d read the Chronicles of Narnia enough times over to believe Aslan guarded me in real life, and Mr. Tumnus, the faun, and I conversed over tea. It wasn’t until Letters… that I acknowledged the man behind my bookish friends. Here, Lewis answers queries from his child readers, and I found a man who urged children into thought, to acknowledge and question the hurt and violence around them, as much in his non-fiction, as in his stories. The letters revealed a man who cherished his imagination but never hid behind fantasy. Here, I realised first that letters revealed character.
In small ways, our times have tried to revive the dying art of letter writing. In 2012, Sakhi Nitin-Anita founded her ‘slow communication’ venture Prem Patra Project, which quickly spread nationwide. Sakhi hoped to nudge us out of our ‘shooting off emails’ lives and rekindle handwritten letters, for she believed the physical slowness of writing would quieten us down mentally too. More recently, Post Crossing, a Portugal community that encourages people across national boundaries to send postcards to addresses collated on their website, had at last count over four lakh enthusiasts from 211 countries, exchanging postcards and stories of their cultures.
On the Internet today, our biggest vanguards of letter writing are Maria Popova of the website Brain Pickings and Shaun Usher of Letters of Note. Popova rummages through diaries, marginalia, and anthologies to cull letters, one of the most delightful collections of which include authors writing to their younger selves. She finds Maya Angelou telling herself to never forget what her mother told her, “When you walk out of my door, don’t let anybody raise you — you’ve been raised.” Usher pulls together a much wider spectrum of letter writers, from literary figures to rockstars, leading to a compendium of wisdom you can sink into for any situation, best of all for a broken heart; from love letters by Beethoven mourning his ‘Immortal Beloved’, to John Steinbeck writing to his teenage son Thom who’s convinced he’s in love, to take it slow, for “nothing good gets away”.
It is this life-wisdom that transcends time that I found in a nondescript book on a roadside stall last week, I Loved A Girl . Written in the Africa of 1940s, the book tells of a young boy and girl, their love unrequited by clan customs, their entire story unfolding only in letters between the two, and their pastor who seeks to help them. In this tour de force of despair and hope, unravels discussions about race and class, colonisation, and the contested ground over which spiritual and cultural norms overlap. What we’ve lost in losing letter writing is this documentation of unedited emotion that stretches beyond cultural lines, which lets us into honest, un-plotted narratives, replete with all the glorious messiness of real life.
