In his book
To the Letter: A Celebration of the Lost Art of Letter Writing (Gotham Books, 464 pages), British Journalist Simon Garfield rues the lost art of writing letters, ominously warning that “A world without letters would surely be a world without oxygen.” With e-mail and text messaging now having virtually eclipsed correspondence by snail mail, Garfield rhetorically predicts that the last letter “will appear in our lifetime” and go unnoticed until it’s too late, “like the last hair to whiten, or the last lovemaking.”
Garfield’s book is able to transcend plain nostalgia and fretfulness by offering the reader delectable anecdotes, historical tidbits, and excerpts from both ancient and modern masters of the letter-writing craft. For instance, we get to know that the 15th century Dutch theologian Erasmus, exasperated that his brother had not written back, chided him with this line: “I believe it would be easier to get blood from a stone than coax a letter out of you!” We learn that the would-be Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius had written this love-note to his teacher, “I am dying so for love of you,” for which he got this reply: “You have made me dazed and thunderstruck by your burning love.” And we get a glimpse of this wanton expression of lust from a British soldier in the battlefield writing by snail mail to his sweetheart: “I think of your breasts more than is good for me.” (Would that soldier have been as uninhibited expressing his ardor by e-mail?)
In a review of Garfield’s book in
The New York Times, Carmela Ciuraru takes delight in these revealing vignettes but doesn’t totally accept the author’s dire prognosis about the letter-writing craft: “Despite Garfield’s alarmist stance, it seems premature to assume that letters will go the way of the woolly mammoth. After all, the death knell has been sounded since at least the invention of the telephone.”
Read Carmela Ciurarru’s “Kind Regards,” a review of Simon Garfield’s To the Letter, in The New York Times now!Read passages from To the Letter selected by Simon Garfield himselfABOUT THE AUTHOR:Simon Frank Garfield is a British journalist and non-fiction author. He is the author of several books including
Expensive Habits: The Dark Side of the Industry, the Somerset Maugham Prize-winning
The End of Innocence: Britain in the Time of AIDS,
The Wrestling,
The Nation’s Favourite: The True Adventures of Radio 1, and
Mauve.
