I like to imagine that as early as humans learned to write, they wrote letters. That people, overflowing with the riches and sorrows of life, found it necessary to put to tablet, papyrus, or paper small fragments of their day, their being itself, to be held close to the hearts of distant friends or loved ones. When I think of letters, I think of Emily Dickinson, or Fyodor Dostoevsky, or Ernest Hemingway. I think of Jane Austen or Saint Paul. I imagine the people who once could hold things dear. But what was precious is now thoroughly cheapened. We no longer pen letters. Human connection is airy. The ties we form are ephemeral and dissolve as easily as they are made. I wonder what is lost in the wholesale of human relationships. I will never know the joy of returning home to a loved one whose face and voice I've, in desperation, held fast to as ink on paper, their blurred and fading details returning to sharpness after years apart. I will never know what it meant for words to have weight.

I was thinking about Frankenstein, and about the epistolary novel as a form. And I don't think the same type of novel is really possible anymore, both with the general replacement of longform correspondence and the instantaneity of modern communication. Somehow the sentimentality of a handcrafted message has been reserved for the domains of the military and prison. There is no longer any common notion of letter writing.

Realizing this, I suddenly felt a bit lonely. Admittedly, I'm of an age that the only reason I've ever had to use snail mail has been bills and taxes, so I know I am significantly romanticizing that which I've never known (e.g. I know that for most of history, as in the distinction between history and prehistory, most people could neither read nor write so letters are certainly not as integral to human heritage as I make it out to be). But I do think that there used to be some threshold of effort that every human relation used to demand. And to me, this was exemplified in the letter to a friend, family member, or partner. Although I feel like there should be something of intrinsic value in a relationship, when it takes no effort to form and maintain it becomes easy to take for granted or worse, becomes expendable. Perhaps many of the relationships we form these days are indeed expendable. Life must have been fuller with fewer people, when those few ties actually mattered.

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