Borrowed: The pen is still mightier than the keyboard

Credit: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-pen-is-still-mightier-than-the-keyboard-tksdpt77q

(as requested by @letterappsoc)

Sorting 1,000 handwritten letters has proved an epiphany: it’s an art form we should cherish

Edward Lucas

Monday January 01 2024, 12.01am, The Times

Spilling out of old cardboard files, the blasts from the past are strewn across my floor. Affectionate, gossipy, grateful, anguished, tantalising, they are scribbled in ballpoint pen on work stationery, typed on flimsy blue aerogrammes or penned in ink on tinted notepaper.

They tell of faraway places and distant events — and of a now near-moribund epistolary culture. From the mid-1970s, at school, university and in a dozen foreign postings, I was an inveterate letter writer to far-flung friends and family. This was the result.

Brought to light during a clear-out last week, the old letters, and copies of my own missives, triggered memories like a Proustian madeleine. The handwriting of long-dead relatives recalled their virtues and vices. I found notes from my mentor, Paddy Ashdown, then an unknown would-be MP, and, later, from Vaclav Havel.

I was a hard-pressed freelance journalist in communist Czechoslovakia; he was a dissident playwright newly released from prison. A few months later he became his country’s president. Both wrote in green ink: Ashdown scrawling in ballpoint pen, Havel stylish in felt-tip. No emails could have such an impact.

Waspish pen-portraits of people and places leap from other pages. Eye-popping descriptions of long-forgotten journalistic rivalries and accompanying sexual impasses are worthy of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop.

But as I ploughed through the dusty, bulging files, rewards were mixed with frustration. I want to bellow instructions across the decades, both to myself and my letter-writing friends. Don’t bother with mere chronicles of events, or worse, their dearth. Give us texture. What did it smell like? How much did you pay? Who else was there? Did you like them? Were you scared? If you didn’t write it down, nobody will ever know.

The poignance is enjoyable if self-indulgent but the most important effect of past correspondence is to correct the teleological edits that my ego imposes on my memory. Hindsight depicts me as better-informed, kinder, funnier and cleverer than I really was.

The letters don’t lie. Reminders of my own misunderstandings, rudenesses, Pooterish self-importance, and the resulting warnings and rebukes, are salutary, particularly when they were overlooked at the time. I must track down a couple of people from the 1980s to whom — I now realise — I owe belated, shuddering apologies.

Cost and convenience are the hammer and anvil that have pulverised our letter-writing habits. Why bother with the tiresome business of writing a letter, finding an envelope, getting the right (overpriced) stamp and hoping that the missive will eventually arrive when you can send it free from the keyboard in seconds?

It seems as archaic as the telegram, telex and ham radio. Over Christmas our visiting nieces, aged four and six, were initially bemused by our local postbox and then entranced by the system it sustains. Letters are like very small Amazon parcels but with a message inside, I explained.

But they are dead data. You cannot search a pile of paper for keywords or sort it automatically by length or sender. Dates and addresses may be missing, words hard to decipher, signatures incomprehensible.

Atoms are vulnerable in a way that electronic messaging, supposedly, is not. When paper is lost, it is gone for ever. The discarded letters, once a product of so much time and effort, plead with me from the recycling bags: surely someone, somewhere might like to read them again?

The electronic universe has its drawbacks too. Changes of employer, lost passwords and other technological mishaps mean my email archive is far patchier than its physical predecessor. And less rewarding. I can muster no great enthusiasm for trawling through my emails. Two days during the post-Christmas doldrums sorting out 1,000-odd letters has been an epiphany. The contrast between their length — typically two or three closely written pages — and their modern counterparts is stark.

The Christmas cards being cleared away in most homes contain at best a scribbled signature and a well-meant sentence. Birthday cards signify endearment but rarely communicate it coherently. Thank-you notes for an overnight stay or a meal from the dwindling ranks of the well-mannered are welcome but seldom contain more than a formulaic paragraph.

Condolences on bereavement are nowadays the main example of proper letters (and having received many in recent years, I underline the comfort they bring). Keeping a diary is not the same: trying to compose words that someone else may read with enjoyment sets a much higher bar.

Writing letters has other pluses too. Using a pen engages a different part of our brain than the keyboard. Our word choice is subtly changed. The selection of paper and writing implement, and the need to think about presentation and legibility, engage our aesthetic sense in a way that choosing the font on a computer does not. We can add doodles and text boxes, and play little tricks: demonstratively crossing out a phrase we have rejected while still signalling that we considered using it.

As my friend David Goodhart points out in his book Head Hand Heart, in modern life we overuse our mental capacities and underuse the fine-motor skills and emotional register evolution has bequeathed us. Composing in longhand, thoughtfully and even lovingly, redresses the balance.

Goodhart’s new year’s resolution is to write more letters by hand. Consider doing the same. Your friends and family will be grateful now and, if they write back, you will have your own madeleines to savour a few decades hence.