The epistle apostle

I was thinking today about how the art of letter-writing is so seemingly lost. In the past two weeks, I have had people tell me that not only was the cost of stamps rising two cents but that the United States Congress is considering passing a bill into law that would charge a nickel for every email message sent in the country. How did we get to this point? It seems that our Information Age technological society simply has forgotten the simple graces of epistolary writing. When was the last time you either received or sent a letter or even a postcard? It seems that even birthday and Christmas cards are down across the board.

It's very sad that an art that has been with mankind for thousands of years is being wiped off the map almost suddenly. It's true that the advent of the telegraph and telephone cut down on the need to communicate by letter, but I believe that it wasn't until the advent of digital email that the death warrant was finally signed.

For many years letters have conveyed the personal thoughts and sentiments of human beings across the world, having simple, personal or even worldwide effects on mankind. Hell, half of the New Testament is a collection of letters. The romance of Thomas Paine and the early revolutionaries, the Pony Express, love letters and family missives sent from war-torn Europe during the 1940s. What would the world be like without these things? What if Dracula was just another story instead of an epistolary masterpiece? As a writer and historian, the detoriation of letter-writing makes me very sad. How are future generations to understand our ways of life, our thoughts, and our dreams without correspondence printed on common parchment? The letters of men great and base are an amazing and incredibly in-depth way of studying the civilizations that preceded us. What a perspective they add!

I urge everyone to flex their creative muscle and break out the Bics to write a letter now and again. You don't have to be as prolific as an H.P. Lovecraft and write a library of tens of thousands, but perhaps drop a line of post now and again. A simple letter to a friend or family member. An unexpected surprise in the mail can be a wonderful surprise, even if it's nothing more than a written greeting or salutations. And what better way to improve your vocabulary and language than putting into words what would normally be a mundane phone conversation? Just think; something you write could be enshrined in the National Archives someday.