There's a little frog inside the mailbox. That makes two of us waiting for mail! Of course, the art of letter-writing in this age of instant communications is all but dead. Even my friend Horst on his remote island in Tonga says he won't be able to write a letter unless he has a computer! And that despite the fact that he has the power on for just a few hours each day.
There was a time when writing letters was our only means of communicating over long distances. And wasn't it nice to read a letter, knowing someone took the time to write it? It is permanent. Once written, you can read it over and over again, and cherish it time after time, knowing that someone cared enough to take the time to write. After all, writing is not an automatic response. It requires thought and concentration -- and effort.
Mail call was such a big thing when I lived in remote parts of the world. To receive a letter from the "outside world", the world that I knew, while I was stuck in the backblocks of New Guinea or the wilds of Borneo, or while I was doing a Lawrence of Arabia in Saudi, was enough to sustain me for days, even weeks. Even a mail-order marketing letter from Reader's Digest was better than nothing!
Ever since our chance meeting aboard the good ship PATRIS, sailing from Australia to Europe in 1967, my old mate Noel Butler and I had kept up a regular correspondence. His letters, written in his faultless copper plate script from his lonely outpost in the Sepik District of New Guinea, never failed to reach me despite my 50-odd address changes across a dozen countries in four continents. In the course of our almost 30-year long friendship we managed to meet about a dozen times in various parts of the world and I would like to think that my letters did as much for him as his did for me in enriching my life and widening my horizon. His last message in April 1995 was a postcard from Childers near Bundaberg where he had retired after coming down from New Guinea. It was one of those "funny" cards, all black with the legend "Childers at Night" embossed across it, to which he had added, "I hope your outlook on the future is not as black as this. Mine is but that's inevitable." I only grasped his meaning when some time later I received a phone call from his sister in Bundaberg telling me that Noel had passed away. For a long time afterwards I would still find myself thinking, "It's about time for another letter from Noel", only to remind myself that there won't be another letter from my mate Noel!
As for letters from other people, I love to receive a three-page, heart-rending, thought-provoking letter, filled with words carefully chosen and eternal. (OK -- I'd be happy with one page -- I'm not hard to please.) And yes, I have written such letters -- with no reply, thank you very much. Maybe I'm just a hopelessly romantic dreamer, or just downright old-fashioned.
When is the last time you wrote someone a letter? Not an e-mail or text message, a real, handwritten with paper and pen, mailed in a stamped envelope letter. That's what I thought.
We have become so addicted to instant communication that the very idea of writing someone a letter seems as ancient as 8-track tapes (if you don't know what those are, ask your mom). Even the speed of text messages and e-mails isn't fast enough for some people, giving rise to a host of abbreviations that I can't even begin to keep up with. And whether we realise it or not, there is a great danger in the loss of the letter.
The danger is that we will become the first generation in history to leave no written record of ourselves. If George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, or Ernest Hemingway had only used e-mail, would we have the same record of them that we possess through their letters and journals today? If Jefferson had sent text messages to Adams, think what would have been lost to history.
I realise the irony of saying this as I type this blog that people I have never met will read. But will anyone go to the trouble of printing it out and filing it away for posterity? Not likely. Because it's just one of possibly hundreds they'll at least scan over the course of the day. It may have good information, and they may even put some of it to use, but no one will keep it.
