Christian McEwen

KEEPING IN TOUCH

Whether or not we keep a daily journal or a blog, or make time to work on poems or short stories, most of us now sit down to write on a daily basis. Some three-quarters of all Americans spend more than an hour a day reading and responding to email, which has spread its tentacles across the mildest and most uncomplicated schedules, demanding (and often being granted) an almost instantaneous response. Sixteenth century writers used to scrawl "Haste, haste, haste, for lyfe, for lyfe, haste!" on their most urgent missives. Five hundred years later, every new communication arrives with equal insistence: a true democracy of desperation.

Writing letters was once an easy weekly chore. Most of mine were written (not always legibly) by hand: written, that is to say, in comfortable alignment with the speed of thought. I liked to set aside two or three hours, a Sunday afternoon, perhaps, a Thursday evening, when I could sit down to a stack of unanswered mail, paper and envelopes piled up close to hand. My friend Eleanor Adams, now in her nineties, remembers the precise hierarchies of the stationery drawer: the heavy gray paper with the deckle edges, the plain cream, the headed notepaper with address and phone number engraved across the top. I myself was happy with cheap white typing paper. But I held to the formalities nonetheless. My letters began with "Dear" or "Dearest," and ended with "Yours sincerely" or "All best wishes," "Love," or Lots of love." Typos were blotted carefully with white-out, or blithely scribbled in along the margin. In those days, there was one letter, and one letter only. Unless you kept a rough draft, or made a special trip to the copy-shop, your recipient got the letter, you had the modest pleasure of accomplishment, and that was that.

All this seems unbelievably long ago.

Most letters have now been replaced by emails or instant messages. Instead of relatively structured, relatively thoughtful epistles, sent to one specific person at one specific address, correspondence has warped into a far brisker and more casual exchange, often sent to several people at a time: something like an eternal (or interminable) game of multi-dimensional table-tennis,in which Q & A, confirmation and instruction and expanded commentary, are forever ping-ponging back and forth. News proliferates like dust, filling the screen with a daily blitz of information. The body of the text has shrunk to a mere handful of phrases; greetings have become exiguous at best, paragraphs,frequently, are non-existent. The long leisurely,expansive screed, full of irony and affection and close-knit observation, has almost entirely disappeared.

Postcards have for the most part vanished too. You can still find them, at exorbitant prices, in big museums and high-end stationery outlets, or (more cheaply) in cut-price tourist emporia, along with baseball caps and snow-globes and key-chains and the rest. But many stores have stopped carrying them altogether. The Postcard Distributers Association of North America has dropped the word "postcard" from its name, as the sale of cards continues to decline. Unless you spring for a "souvenir pack" of 12 or 20 cards, no postcards can now be found at the Central Park Zoo in New York City. Visitors prefer to take their own pictures on their cell-phones or with disposable cameras; they text their friends right here, right now, as they wander round an exhibit, or call them from the street as they wait for a cab. The pause for thought, for clarity, the quiet limbo between experience and response, has almost entirely disappeared. And the pleasure of a postcard in and of itself: a tiny icon which can be propped on a mantlepiece or bedside table, attached with magnets to the fridge, slipped into the edge of a mirror, or pasted to the front of a journal, is a loss that no one even seems to mourn.

And yet a postcard - just because it is so cheap, so light, so portable - can be astonishingly resilient and evocative. Who has not opened a book to find a battered postcard thrust between the pages? Who has not puzzled over a date, a smudgy postmark, and reread the message from so long ago, studying the ease or awkwardness of the phrasing, the swirl of a signature, even the number of kisses?

Every time I opened my collected Emily Dickinson, a certain postcard used to flutter out: an image of Virginia Woolf at her most exquisite. A gold heart had been crayoned on the other side, almost obliterated by a barbed wire tangle of competing words. There were names of drugs like Smack, Red Devil, Mr C; there were references to life and writing: Rent, Bookcases, Papa Poems. The card had no signature, but I had no need of one. It was a Valentine card, post-marked February 1983, and the handwriting belonged to my friend Rosie.

Because of their brevity, and the play between words and image, postcards are perhaps especially potent. But letters have their own intrinsic resonance. The Scottish poet Gerry Cambridge likes to write by hand, using a pen bought in the Fountain Pen Hospital in New York City on his first visit to the United States. This is an heirloom pen, a 520 Waterman Red Ripple, with superflex nib, made circa 1933, and his ink is an electric turquoise, unmistakably his own. My friend Barbara Bash uses a fine black felt-pen, which arches across the page with a calligrapher's flowing authority. In each case, the writer's character imprints itself upon your eye almost before you have drawn their pages from the envelope. Often there's a distinctive scent as well. My sister Katie's letters used to smell of oil paint; my uncle Patrick's had the tang of pipe tobacco.

Email, on the other hand, is distinguished by little more than its fragmentations and misspellings, its utter transience. Reading it seems to take no time at all. It is as if the message dissolves into the blood stream instantaneously, leaving only a thin white glitter on the surface of the mind. There are no pages now to muse or ponder, no handwriting to analyze, no folded envelope to thrust into one's back pocket. Lost in the shuffle is anticipation: the sweet, charged interval between writing a letter to a beloved friend, and the satisfaction of his or her reply. Lost too is the hiatus between receiving such a letter, and gathering one's own forces in response: the pause for integration and incorporation, the gradual ripening. Gerard Manley Hopkins writes well about such intervals. As a rule, he says, it is best not to reply too promptly. Even if one does decide to indulge the questions put by one's correspondent, a letter should be more than just an answer. "I suppose the right way is to let it sink into you, and reply after a day or two."

That pause, that moment of respite, is entirely foreign to the nature of email, which is predicated above all upon instant gratification, the lightening-strike response. Fortunately, most of us simply can't keep up with the daily waterfall of correspondence, which means that email too has its limbos and longeurs. I'm sure I'm not alone in choosing to print out an especially rich and "letter-like" missive, in order to answer it more carefully at a later time.

When I have to travel for my teaching, I often bring along a batch of just such emails, plus a small leather wallet fat with postcards, paper, envelopes and stamps. Wedged between the fold-down table and the padded seat, looking out over the clouds (each cloud, I recently learned, the weight of 100 elephants!) I surrender to the pleasures of old-fashioned epistolary friendship, warmed by my friends' kindness, their imagined company, even before I first begin to write.

I realize, of course, that the far-flung buddies whom I conjure up may in reality be as crabby and distracted as my neighbors across the aisle. But as I bring those smiling faces to my mind, I find myself delighted, energized. It is as if the simple act of writing worked like a burning glass, gathering up the accumulated observations, the jokes and memories, the tender questions, and turned them all to vivid, living flame.