Why we need to bring back the art of letter writing

People who were in primary school in the nineties will recall nostalgically how much writing (and receiving) a letter meant in those days. So seriously was letter-writing taken that there were full-length lessons dedicated to it. ILLUSTRATION| FILE

What you need to know:

  • The internet and digitalisation have made communications cheaper and faster in that you can get your responses in real time, but they have also made the art of letter writing lose that unique nostalgic feel.
  • That feeling of pen scratching away on paper expressing your emotions.
  • Today, instead of expressing themselves in words, people do so in memes and emojis.
  • Got feedback on this story? E-mail: [email protected]

Nothing saddens me more about the digital revolution than the death of letter writing.

People who were in primary school in the nineties will recall nostalgically how much writing (and receiving) a letter meant in those days. So seriously was letter-writing taken that there were full-length lessons dedicated to it.

And who can forget pen pals?

On reading authors like Haruki Murakami, you get a personal feel of coarse emotion from how he advances his prose through letters. Perhaps this stylistic device is best captured in his book The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle where the protagonist, Toru Okada (Mr Wind-up Man), exchanges letters with other characters in conversations that have either been proven too emotional to continue having or a state of mind where one cannot talk in person.

Take, for instance, when Mr Wind-up bird is forced to cut short a narrative that will later shape the events in the book with Lieutenant Mamiya, who is telling the story, or the curious case of the teenager May Kasahara, who is clearly going through an emotionally disturbed frame of mind and the only way she can express this is through letters, or Toru Okada's wife Kumiko, who ran away but agrees to only talk to Mr Wind-Up through a letter.

SPEAKING IN MEMES AND EMOJIS

But it is not just in fiction and prose where the romance of letter writing has captured many over the centuries. Letters have been used to declare war, steal secrets, transmit coded messages, create hobbies (stamp collectors), save marriages and above all advance love (take the instance of solders fighting in the first and second world wars whose loved ones would never have known how they were faring save for the missives sent to and from home).

Look at the cases of the letters of Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain. Or, closer to home, the letters that are now historical artefacts, such as those written by Kenya’s founding President Jomo Kenyatta.

The internet and digitalisation have made communications cheaper and faster in that you can get your responses in real time, but they have also made the art of letter writing lose that unique nostalgic feel. That feeling of pen scratching away on paper expressing your emotions.

Today, instead of expressing themselves in words, people do so in memes and emojis.

In reading a well-written letter, one can draw the emotional state of the writer or even the immediate surroundings. It is deliberately exposing one’s soul to examination.

Got feedback on this story? E-mail: [email protected]