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 an old friend who lives off-grid on a very remote island in the Kingsom of Tonga says he won't be able to write a letter unless he has a computer!
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 had taken the time to write it? It was permanent. Once written, you could read it over and over again, and cherish it time after time, knowing that someone had 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 Arabia, 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".
As for letters from other people, I loved to receive a long, three-page, heart-rending, thought-provoking letter, filled with words carefully chosen and eternal. (OK -- I would've been happy with one page -- I wasn't hard to please.) And yes, I have written such letters -- often getting no reply, thank you very much. Maybe I was just a hopelessly romantic dreamer, or just downright old-fashioned.
When was the last time you wrote someone a letter? Not an e-mail or text message, but a real, handwritten-with-paper-and-pen (dare I suggest fountain pen?) mailed-in-a-stamped-envelope letter. Exactly!
We have become so addicted to instant communication that the very idea of writing someone a letter seems as ancient as 8-track tapes or black-and-white television. 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? 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 click on or swipe over in the course of the day.
