“It gives me great Pain to see that the translation which has appeared in your Gazette of the extract of my Journal is preceeded by an Observation which leaves room to suppose that it has been my intention to augment the merits of my Own Services by diminishing those of others.” Among the source material I’m consulting you’ll find a letter, dated 11 November 1779, to M.J. The font I’m currently working on replicates the penmanship of John Paul Jones (1747–1792). It might contain good or bad news, words of love or aggravation-emotions that often come right through. But a letter goes further-comprises thoughts, observations, stories, communication. Consider a signature- an important, personal, persistent creation by someone wielding a pen. It surpasses the intimacy of a handkerchief or tool or hairbrush belonging to a historical figure. The intimacy of an old handwritten letter, seems to me, surpasses even a photo of a lost loved one. As used to happen back when we bothered to go through the motions.
Assuming the letter reaches its recipient, the results of all those motions appear in an actual physical object-one that might even get passed down through generations. The process involves lot of decisions, and a lot of touching (the pen, the paper, the envelope).
They must have the address of the recipient handy (maybe know it by heart), likely have to fold the paper, might even have to lick the flap of the envelope before sliding it into a mail slot.
Letter-writers must then choose paper and a pen, make time to sit at a desk or table or subway car, compose mental sentences, and transfer those sentences via pen to page. To write a letter, a person must first feel a sense of urgency, a desire or obligation to communicate with another person too far away to talk to, when a phone call simply will not do. In thinking about my thank-you note, it struck me that there’s plenty more losses to mourn-beyond simply the thrill of recognition. But what percentage of us actually bother to write a letter by hand anymore, cursive or no? Losses to mourn No doubt kids still pass notes in class, and recognizing familiar hand-printing can certainly engender an emotional response. My guess is a new generation has trouble even deciphering cursive. Yet in these digital, online days, cursive script is no longer a core curriculum in schools. I’ve written here about the thrill a person gets to recognize the handwriting of a loved one on, say, an envelope. And, yet again, I got to thinking about what we’ve lost with the decline of the habit of putting pen to paper. Soon after I composed that note, I read about a family who nearly lost four decades of valued personal correspondence. My handwriting has badly suffered for lack of practice. Nearly everything I write is digital: email, PMs, digital documents I can print out and send by the U.S. I’ve written daily for many years, but these days I do it on a laptop keyboard. Only afterward did I realize it was the first handwritten letter I’d produced in a long, long time. Having received a particularly thoughtful gift over the holidays, I picked up a pen, wrote a thank-you note, put it in an envelope, and dropped it in the mail.
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