Letters are dead, emailing is in. When was the last time you opened a stamped addressed envelope that contained a personal scribble rather than a bank statement? Such was the novelty of receiving a handwritten postcard last week that reading it felt all Downton Abbey-esque, like I should stand up afterwards with furrowed brow and gravely announce to the room that war had been declared.
You can only protest so much about the death of the letter before sounding like a new-age Neanderthal, but it does call into question how contemporary politicians, authors, actors and Jordan are going to record their correspondences for posterity (and posthumous serialisation in Hello! Magazine). With letters it’s easy: simply pile them up in a forgotten bureau for a grieving relative to discover. But emails? Do you create a special folder in your inbox labelled ‘The Juicy Bits’? Or does said relative have to sift through years of spam to come up with the goods?
Provided they can be found, it’s unlikely such emails will match the cloistered intimacy one can assume with letters. There’s something terribly sobering about seeing your words typed up in an email, poised to become permanent as soon as you hit the send button. Between clinical clicks of the keyboard and penis enlargement pop-ups there’s not much room left in which to divulge the secret poetries of the soul.
"Between clinical clicks of the keyboard and penis enlargement pop-ups..."
ReplyDeleteGenius.
Letters are a wonderful, touchable, absolutely personal little piece of history. The poor old email doesn't stand a chance x