In Defense of Writing Letters

My life is a joke and rife with coincidence. I was walking to the mailbox earlier (yes, at 1:30AM) to drop off a letter, and I found this book on top of the mailbox, along with a post-it note that said “free” on it: 

Some kind and thoughtful soul evidently wanted to share the book with anyone who was interested. It’s a compilation of written correspondence bridging the Iron Curtain. This amuses me on two levels: 1) I’m obsessed with Soviet history, 2) I’m currently on a crusade to revive the lost art of Writing Letters. I can’t wait to read it.

Let’s breeze past my obsession with the Cold War era.

Letters seem to be a dying art, and I completely understand why. We live in a digital age -- people are captivated by technology and speed. We can’t be arsed to read the paper, so we get our news from tweets. Faxing takes too long; we prefer to send scans. Paging was cool in the 90s, and then we decided that it took too long to wait for somebody to call us back and started using cell phones. Phone calls take too much of our time: we prefer to circumvent the obligatory “Hello, how are you?” or the possibility that we might get forwarded to a voicemail box and simply text our friends and acquaintances when we need something from them. Instead of taking the time out of our day to call and chat with friends, we prefer to stalk them on Facebook and occasionally become passively involved in their lives by “liking" their status updates if we can find time away from broadcasting our own narcissism into the virtual ether (no, I'm not bashing Facebook. It's practical and convenient and I use it a lot). Sadly, In such an age, letter-writing (completely understandably) falls to the way side.

Now, here’s why I think people should still write letters:

• It takes time. It forces you to slow down and smell the proverbial roses. You have to sit down and collect your thoughts. You have to disconnect yourself from the fast-paced digital world for a moment and remember that there is a life outside of the internet (I know. It’s an earth-shattering concept). Because it takes so much time, it shows that you truly do think and care about the recipient. If you want to write a good and thoughtful letter, you simply cannot do it in two minutes. You’re probably going to be sitting there for at least twenty if you want to produce a piece of writing that somebody else is going to want to read. 

• It’s a mental exercise. Sure, you can still write a thoughtful letter to somebody via email. There’s a crucial difference between writing something on the computer and writing something on a piece of paper, however, and that is the backspace key. You can fix an error on the computer very easily: a few key strokes, and voila! Not so when you’re writing a paper letter -- it turns into a very unpleasant and messy process involving gloopy, gunky, sticky, yucky correctional fluid. This places emphasis on getting things right the first time -- something that we don’t seem to worry about much nowadays. (Just think of digital photography: once upon a time, taking crappy pictures cost a lot of money -- you had to buy film and pay to have them developed. Nowadays, you easily end up with megabytes upon megabytes of shitty photos you’ve forgotten to delete off your harddrive). Granted, it’s great to be able to fix your mistakes on the computer, but the relative easiness of doing so causes many people to become complacent and slack off in terms of accuracy. Additionally, there’s something satisfying about the act of holding a pen to paper, and you’re more likely to remember what you’ve written if you’ve taken the time to actually physically write it down.

• It’s aesthetically pleasing. On many levels. There are multiple considerations that go into creating a letter: 1) you have to select a paper, 2) you have to select a pen, 3) you show off your penmanship, and 4) you have to choose a stamp. Paper alone is a difficult choice -- there’s different textures, colors, and watermarks from which to choose.  You can even opt to have it scented. Pens pose another serious dilemma -- will you opt for the elegance of a fountain pen, or are you going to go with the more practical and simple ballpoint pen? What color ink will you choose? The way you form your characters (is it cursive or print? are you writing hurriedly?) reveals a lot about your state of mind. If you’re feeling super classy, you can give the envelope a wax seal and gild it. Finally, you have to choose a stamp. There’s many variables that show off various aspects of your personality and the degree of involvement that went into creating the final document. With an email, you’re limited to choosing a font, how you’re going to format your paragraph breaks, and deciding whether or not you’re going to insert images.

• There's no immediate gratification. It takes time for the letter to reach the recipient, and it takes additional time for the recipient to draft a response. Depending on where you're sending the letter, this can be a few days or a few weeks. You don't get an immediate confirmation or receipt, or an immediate gleeful outburst of "THANK YOU! YOU'RE AN AWESOME PERSON FOR DOING THIS!" You simply have to hope and trust your efforts will be gratified with a response. This teaches you two things: 1) patience, 2) suspension of expectation. Emails and text messages kill our realization that people have lives outside of our own. Just think of how many times you've been angry at a person for not immediately replying to your text message, or how many times you've neurotically refreshed your email inbox when you were expecting an urgent email. Mail is only delivered once daily -- checking your mailbox neurotically is futile and inherently idiotic (something you realize perhaps only when you catch yourself doing it).

Yes, the act of writing a paper letter is an involving and time-consuming process. Yes, it’s a bit old-fashioned and definitely not a practical way of communicating urgent information. There's a thousand and one additional arguments you can make against the act. Nonetheless, I think it still has a place in contemporary society. Next time you’re feeling bored, get your ass off Facebook and try walking into a paper store. They are actual places that exist, and they are not merely havens for hipsters and stuck-up people who should live in another century. See what you end up walking out of there with. You’ll realize that the post office has other uses besides distributing bills and junk mail. I can guarantee you there’s really no better feeling when you open your mailbox and see a letter from a friend.

I Hate Television.

For years, I was adamant about the fact that television sucked. I sold my TV, canceled my cable service, and went on an angry crusade about how television was completely ruining society. I saw it as a devilish box created to glue people to their sofas as they munched on potato chips and turned into stereotypical fat Americans. I refused to speak about any shows, laughed at people when they gave me recommendations, and generally acted like a grandiose jerk to anybody who didn’t agree with me.

Exhibit A: Mindless TV viewer munching on potato chips.

I’m still pretty steadfast with my opinion, but there has been a few things lately that have poked a few holes in it. Notably, two shows: Netflix’s House of Cards and HBO’s Newsroom.

WHY?

Let me explain. I like things that make consumers think. I read books obsessively because they make me think. The process is intensely self-gratifying -- by reading and engaging myself in a complex narrative, I can tell myself that I am intellectual and thereby feel smart. It’s an ego thing. By watching these two shows, I am able to do make a similar claim to myself. 

House of Cards (first airing in February or this year) may or may not count as a television show. It airs on Netflix exclusively, which exempts it from any sort of regulation. This is awesome, as it allows the producers to do whatever they want (well, whatever Netflix wants them to do). The show is produced by Beau Willimon and it’s an adaptation of a previous BBC series by the same name. It dramaticizes American politics in all of their gritty glory (shame?). Through intensely suspenseful personal narratives, it sheds light on sides of American politics that may not be readily recognized by the average viewer. It breaks down the system of congress and makes people understand why Congressmen act the way they do. It sheds light on personal agendas and corporate interests that come do play in the process of drafting American law. Granted, because it’s television, it may be a bit overly dramatic, and the narratives may be extreme (suicide, murder, drug use, spousal issues). Nonetheless, it educates and raises awareness. And it stars Kevin Spacey.

Newsroom is an HBO series produced by Aaron Sorkin of The Social Network fame. It began airing in 2012. The show, aside from chronicling the drama caused by the overblown ego of prominent news anchor Will MacAvoy, deals with the way that our news is manufactured and produced. It alerts the viewer to how news can be biased or choose to omit certain stories. It also throws in tons of actual events and has its basis in journalistic reality. The end goal seems to be to educate viewers on current events (well, semi-current -- the setting is 2011-2012) they may have missed, and to alert them to be more attentive to the way they consume news.

To me, these two shows epitomize what television should be. They’re smart, they’re socially relevant, they educate, and they entertain. The writing is tight, witty, and intelligent. It’s not an easy to create shows like that, especially in a country that seems to run on reality TV garbage (16 & Pregnant anybody? Blargh.).  I respect their producers and writers, and I cannot wait to see where both of them go.

I still hate TV with a passion that I cannot quite put into words. I may scream if somebody mentions Jersey Shore to me one more time. But, for now, I’m going to rescind my absolute condemnation of television and say, “There may be some good things out there.”

This bears reading.

For the past few weeks, I've been reading a book by Andrei Platonov entitled Happy Moscow. I started it when I was still overseas in St. Petersburg. My edition of the book has been through a lot -- it went on a train ride to Moscow, it visited Valaam, it was touched (read: severely water-damaged) by St. Petersburg's summer showers, and then it took a detour to Mexico City when United Airlines lost my luggage as I was traveling back home to Oakland. I finally finished the book today and realized that the NYBR edition of it does not contain merely the story bearing the name "Happy Moscow," but it also contains the three short stories out of which the novella was constructed, a screenplay that was never filmed entitled "Father," and an essay entitled "On the First Socialist Tragedy." 

The essay is what got me.

It's been a while since I've encountered a single piece of writing that has made such a strong impact on me, and I read a lot. I read a lot of socialist realist books and banned literature from the USSR. Everything published in that part of the world in that era deals in some way with the idea of a communist utopia, alternately condemning and praising it. I frequently flirt with the ideas of socialism and communism and study the history surrounding them extensively. Ultimately, I'm torn on where I stand with it all -- so I'm not even going to go into that. This piece of writing deals with so much more than that, though. Platonov was, for all his ideological flaws, a believer in the promise of the communist utopia. It's evident when you read the piece. He wrestled extensively with the industrialization of the Soviet Union, however, believing that mechanizing and calculating everything with ultimately destroy humanity.

Although it was written in 1934 and talks a lot about circumstances that were unique to the Soviet Union, I'm going to argue that it remains relevant today. It's Platonov talking about what it means to be human in the context of rapid industrialization and amazing technological discoveries. He reminds us that the fact that we CAN do something doesn't necessarily mean that we SHOULD do it. Technology is evolving at a pace much faster than the human mind. On one hand, that's great. I'm all for science and the pursuit of knowledge. The danger lies in the abuse of the knowledge found. Hopefully ethics will catch up to our inventions, and SOON. 

There are two editions of the essay. The shorter one is reprinted below. If you like what you read, I strongly urge you to go dig up the longer one. It bears reading. 

ON THE FIRST SOCIALIST TRAGEDY

One should keep one’s head down and not revel in life: our time is better and more serious than blissful enjoyment. Anyone who revels in it will certainly be caught and perish, like a mouse that has crawled into a mousetrap to ‘revel in’ a piece of lard on the bait pedal. Around us there is a lot of lard, but every piece is bait. One should stand with the ordinary people in their patient socialist work, and that’s all.

This mood and consciousness correspond to the way nature is constructed. Nature is not great, it is not abundant. Or it is so harshly arranged that it has never bestowed its abundance and greatness on anyone. This is a good thing, otherwise—in historical time—all of nature would have been plundered, wasted, eaten up, people would have revelled in it down to its very bones; there would always have been appetite enough. If the physical world had not had its one law—in fact, the basic law: that of the dialectic—people would have been able to destroy the world completely in a few short centuries. More: even without people, nature would have destroyed itself into pieces of its own accord. The dialectic is probably an expression of miserliness, of the daunting harshness of nature’s construction, and it is only thanks to this that the historical development of humankind became possible. Otherwise everything on earth would long since have ended, as when a child plays with sweets that have melted in his hands before he has even had time to eat them.

Where does the truth of our contemporary historical picture lie? Of course, it is a tragic picture, because the real historical work is being done not on the whole earth, but in a small part of it, with enormous overloading.

The truth, in my view, lies in the fact that ‘technology . . . decides everything’. Technology is, indeed, the subject of the contemporary historical tragedy, if by technology we understand not only the complex of man-made instruments of production, but also the organization of society, solidly founded on the technology of production, and even ideology. Ideology, incidentally, is located not in the superstructure, not ‘on high’, but within, in the middle of society’s sense of itself. To be precise, one needs to include in technology the technician himself—the person—so that one does not obtain an iron-hard understanding of the question.

The situation between technology and nature is a tragic one. The aim of technology is: ‘give me a place to stand and I will move the world’. But the construction of nature is such that it does not like to be beaten: one can move the world by taking up the lever with the required moment, but one must lose so much along the way and while the long lever is turning that, in practice, the victory is useless. This is an elementary episode of dialectics. Let us take a contemporary fact: the splitting of the atom. The same thing. The worldwide moment will arrive when, having expended a quantity of energy n on the destruction of the atom, we will obtain n + 1 as a result, and will be so happy with this wretched addition, because this absolute gain was obtained as a result of a seemingly artificial alteration of the very principle of nature; that is, the dialectic. Nature keeps itself to itself, it can only function by exchanging like for like, or even with something added in its favour; but technology strains to have it the other way around. The external world is protected from us by the dialectic. Therefore, though it seems like a paradox: the dialectic of nature is the greatest resistance to technology and the enemy of humankind. Technology is intended for and works towards the overturning or softening of the dialectic. So far it has only modestly succeeded, and so the world still cannot be kind to us.

At the same time, the dialectic alone is our sole instructor and resource against an early, senseless demise in childish enjoyment. Just as it was the force that created all technology.

In sociology, in love, in the depths of man the dialectic functions just as invariably. A man who had a ten-year-old son left him with the boy’s mother, and married a beauty. The child began to miss his father, and patiently, clumsily hanged himself. A gram of enjoyment at one end was counterbalanced by a tonne of grave soil at the other. The father removed the rope from the child’s neck and soon followed in his wake, into the grave. He wanted to revel in the innocent beauty, he wanted to bear his love not as a duty shared with one woman, but as a pleasure. Do not revel—or die.

Some naive people might object: the present crisis of production refutes such a point of view. Nothing refutes it. Imagine the highly complex armature of society in contemporary imperialism and fascism, giving off starvation and destruction for mankind in those parts, and it becomes clear at what cost the increase in productive forces was attained. Self-destruction in fascism and war between states are both losses of high-level production and vengeance for it. The tragic knot is cut without being resolved. The result is not even a tragedy in a classical sense. A world without the ussr would undoubtedly destroy itself of its own accord within the course of the next century.

The tragedy of man, armed with machinery and a heart, and with the dialectic of nature, must be resolved in our country by means of socialism. But it must be understood that this is a very serious task. The ancient life on the ‘surface’ of nature could still obtain what it needed from the waste and excretions of elemental forces and substances. But we are making our way inside the world, and in response it is pressing down upon us with equivalent force.