Sense and Sensibility

When You Care Enought To Send the Very Least

This year, the recession and technology combined to produce a simulacrum of holiday warmth: The e-mail holiday greeting.

For those of us who care enough to send the very least, e-mail offered the opportunity to prove our desultory commitment to good cheer. If your office was anything like ours, it was noticeably lacking in the heartwarming holiday cards businesses send to ensure first place in your hearts in the coming year.

Instead, businesses cut costs and talked turkey, finally acknowledging the perfunctory nature of the exercise by mass-mailing e-mails to hordes of near-strangers on whom their fortunes rely.

It was a peculiar acknowledgement of the obvious: seasonal greetings have become empty gestures, one more hollow obligation of civility that we can no longer afford and whose worthy we roundly doubt.

I am one of those endangered oddballs who actually look forward to Christmas cards, ever expectant that they will contain more than a salutation and signature and will, in fact, contain something resembling novelty and earnestness. A lot can happen in a year, particularly a year like the one we’ve just endured, and Christmas cards, from friends, family or businesses allow the opportunity to connect in ways that we have convinced ourselves we are too busy to do the rest of the year.

So desperate am I in my quest for intimate expression that I have come to relish those self-congratulatory “family newsletters” where everyone is smarter, richer and better preserved than I.

In his new book, “Yours, Ever: People and Their Letters,” Thomas Mallon revisits the world where apprehension, hope and the mailbox were inextricably linked. It is, for most of us, a lost and romanticized world, mourned and over as if its demise was engineered by external forces and not of our own making. We have abandoned the letter; it has not abandoned us. And yet most of us pose as victims, rather than agents of its destruction.

“Yours Ever” is a buoyant, wistful ode to what we have discarded, and perhaps a clarion call to resurrect an art form we have come to believe as technologically redundant. No one who knows anything about language or emotion can reasonably claim that e-mail replaces the letter any more than “LOL” substitutes for a friend’s hearty laugh.  What, as Edmund Morris has noted, might have been the effect if Ronald Reagan’s announcement that he had Alzheimer’s disease had been e-mailed. It was the pained rawness of Reagan’s hand-written letter that gave his revelation poignancy.

In a more penurious time in my life, the only obstacle that kept me from letter-writing was the cost of a stamp. In college, my obliging grandmother would send me a book of them along with her hastily penned, rambling and indiscriminate reflections whose receipt I treasured. It was my grandmother who showed me that one could write a letter about anything, even a joke whose punch-line one could not remember. What was important was the spirit behind it and the jauntiness inherent in it.

John Donne confessed to Sir Henry Wootton in 1628, that he “preferred writing little, and that in a rather slovenly manner, to not writing at all.”

But the letter has always been prey to expedience. Writing to Gustav Flaubert in 1869, George Sand bemoaned the effect the telegram had had on the letter and worried about “how full of fact and free of uncertainty life will be when such procedures have been still more simplified.”

Uncertainty, as Sand presciently divined, is the bete noir of the modern world. It is why we have SUVs impaled with GPS’, cell phones, Blackberries and televisions bleating in every public square. Nothing is worse than being out-of-touch, except, as any anxiety-ridden CEO will tell you, being constantly in touch.

And yet in a world in which delayed gratification has taken on the mantle of hard labor, a letter sent from a friend can be a rare and exquisite delicacy, a bit like personal customer service unscathed by a 1-800 number to Bangalore. The letter, reviewer Stacy Schiff notes is part of “that forgiving territory where you could safely park your despair, issue a cry from the heart, offer advice, share the ancillary epiphany, exact revenge; where you might be, in short, melancholy, tentative, beastly, sulky brooding, nuts.”

Every month or so, I receive a letter from a dear friend whose hypnotic Palmer script and juicily sprawling letters have become a singular luxury. My friend typically includes carefully scissored newspaper articles, often with passages underlined. The letters themselves can ramble about anxiety over an impending family visit, or gently grumble about this or that political imbroglio, or share a moment that seemed mundane but turned epiphanaic. I savor them like an after-dinner liqueur, waiting for the precious interval between wakefulness and sleep. They bring my friend nearer in a way no HTML can. They are the gifts that defy imitation, an intimate gesture in a world otherwise barren of them, the last vestige of authenticity in a world in which the simulated will never entirely replace the real.

Contact: Tracey@traceyosh.com