I love writing letters. But one doesn't get a letter in the mail too often these days and I think that's to be lamented. The letter... and i do mean the handwritten letter... not the typed business letter one gets informing them of their excellent credit or acceptance into college... the handwritten letter is a dying art, an anachronism of a romantic age supplanted by the modern... by email, instant messaging, and texting... hi-tech couriers that can transport a message across the distance of a street or ocean in less time than a single breath. Admittedly, there is not only a convenience but a benefit to this immediacy. As a conversation is being sustained electronically across the distances, so too a friendship, with all the simple ease of typing a few witty words and pressing send. When such correspondence can take seconds, what need have we of letters, then, when they can take days and even weeks?

My former girlfriend and I used to exhange letters frequently in seeming ignorance of the fact that we spoke daily by phone, by email, and by instant messaging. It wasn't that there was something to be said to each other that wasn't said in our day to day communication, for all things of importance were said with the immediacy that modern life affords us. No, there was never anything new said in those letters we would write. But there was something in them that could not be conveyed in any other way, something that exists in the deliberateness of each pen stroke, in the crease of the paper, in the ink, in the waiting and anticipation of that envelope's arrival. A letter carefully crafted is a labor of one's heart that says to whom it's written, "For you I'm making a gift. I've taken an afternoon or an evening of my time and devoted it only to you, to thinking of you in a quiet place and choosing carefully every word I'm using. And I've used my hands the way a sculptor or a painter uses his, so that what you've opened is something special as you are special to me."

But I think my explanation is not nearly so eloquent as this one, taken from a letter the male lead in A.R. Gurney's play "Love Letters" writes to explain to the woman he loves why he chooses to write to her...

"... This letter, which I'm writing with my own hand, with my own pen, in my own penmanship, comes from me and no one else, and is a present of myself to you. It's not typewritten, though I've learned how to type. There's no copy of it, though I suppose I could use a carbon. And it's not a telephone call, which is dead as soon as it is over. No, this is just me, me the way I write, the way my writing is, the way I want to be to you, giving myself to you across a distance, not keeping or retaining any part of it for myself, giving this piece of myself to you totally, and you can tear me up and throw me out, or keep me, and read me today, tomorrow, any time you want until you die."