Dear reader,

Hard-copy letters—the kind you handwrite, type, or print, and mail in envelopes to the recipients—are going the way of the dodo, and most people are okay with that. It’s hard to argue with the immediacy and economy of e-mail, even for celebrated man of letters Roger Angell, the 91-year-old son of Katharine Angell and stepson of E.B. White.

Conceding in a recent New Yorker essay that the death of the letter is inevitable, Angell expresses a sentiment that many others have echoed and that I’ve never seen disputed: that compared to electronic communication there’s something deliberate and literary (my word, not Angells) about a letter, something more lasting not just physically but psychologically. Letters exchanged between two senders, Angell writes, “become a correspondence, and mysteriously take on a tone of their own: some rambly and comfortably boring; others cool and funny; some financial; some confessional. They stick in the mind and seem worth the trouble.”

I was once an incredibly avid correspondent in this manner. I recently discovered a notebook I kept from 1996 to 1999, listing every single piece of mail I sent; the fact that only three years’ correspondence, with two lines per item, completely fills a notebook on both sides of each sheet gives you some indication of just how much mail I used to send. E-mail existed, of course, so I was proudly anachronistic in my embrace of snail mail. I didn’t get nearly as much back as I sent: I noted which missives were in response to mail I’d received and which ones were sent, as it were, cold, and it looks like my return rate was around 50%, which is not bad, all things considered. Since I sent about two letters or cards a day, I received about one a day, and I still have it all—preserved in sheet protectors in binders, though not organized as neatly as my Facebook timeline.

That collected correspondence is a priceless guide to the lives of my friends and family members from about 1993, when I went to college until around 2000, when I ceased my practice of regular letter-writing. (Not coincidentally, it was just about this time that I started actually having girlfriends.) Is my life now lacking something that it used to have? Well, by definition, yes—but I now have a lot more time, and I don’t think the virtues of letters are without their equivalents in the digital era.

Letter-writing is supposed to make one more thoughtful, more reflective. Letter-writing is thought to have civilizing properties, but I think that’s largely an artifact of the fact that the historic letters we’re most likely to encounter are those written by educated, erudite people who were good writers. I once read a friend’s manuscript that collected the complete correspondence of a Canadian woman during the First World War, and one reason the manuscript never found a publisher is that it is boring as a slow day at the office—in fact, it’s exactly as boring as a slow day at the office, since that’s what most of the letters describe. The young woman was corresponding with multiple beaus, one of whom was on the front and another of whom worked in (appropriately) a post office. The guy at war accurately describes the experience as consisting mostly of drilling and camping, and the guy at the post office accurately describes his experience as being soul-deadeningly repetitive. By far the most interesting episode of the manuscript involves a third suitor who goes off to seek fame and fortune in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.

My point is that letters are only as interesting as the people who write them—just like tweets, or Facebook statuses, or Tumblr posts. E-mail now serves a lot of the functions IRL mail formerly served, but increasingly, the job of the letter is now performed via social media. Not only is a tweet immediate, it also has the convenient function of reaching a potentially infinite number of recipients simultaneously. When you write letters, you have to write a separate letter to each recipient, often tediously repeating the same details you’ve written in letters to a bunch of other recipients.

It’s true, as Angell notes, that a correspondence via letters would take on a distinctive tone—but for those who care to develop the tone of their writing (a very small subset of everyone who writes), there remain opportunities aplenty online. If you choose to make it one, Twitter is a real-time chess game of tone and timing. There’s your default public voice, but there are also the tones you take in responding to others’ tweets, bearing in mind what mutual followers are likely to be paying attention. Since you’re working with so few characters, tone has to be established with just a few key word choices as well as with careful attention to punctuation. For the lazy and the misguidedly flirtatious, there’s always the emoticon.

The panoply of new-media choices for venues of expression—text message, chat, tweet, status, post, e-mail, Instagram pic, and so forth—have led many observers (primarily older observers, but plenty of cranky younger ones as well) to conclude that we live in an age of distraction, when communication just isn’t as meaningful as it was in the age of the letter. Meaningful is, though, as meaningful does. A letter can much more easily be made canned, rote, or even misleading than can an online post or message: if I’m writing to you from across the country, I can invent a whole life, but if we’re friends on Facebook, I can only stretch so far from the truth.

Online communication rewards people who can digest their experience on a moment-by-moment basis and write about it concisely, accessibly, and insightfully; and those rewards are immediate and quickly scalable. The rewards of letter-writing are more private and slower to develop, but that doesn’t make them better any more than your own personal rotisserie-cooked chicken is better than a pan-seared scallop tossed off by a top chef.

The thing most acutely missing in the transition from hard-copy letters to electronic postings is the letters’ pure physicality: getting a letter from someone you care about is almost like being touched by her. You can feel the indentations her pen left on the paper, you can see the smears left by her hand, you might even be able to smell her lingering perfume or cigarette smoke. But what do all those things leave you wanting? More. A good letter always leaves you wanting more. And now, at last, more is exactly what we have.

Sincerely yours,
@JayGabler