I Wrote a Letter to My Love...

I have been thinking about the pleasure of letters—of writing them and of receiving them. Real letters on paper in ink, sent in an envelope with a stamp.  I write a lot. By which I mean, I put words into emails and blog posts and essays and comments on 9th grade English papers and texts to my family. Those who know me well know I favor Lamy fountain pens and that purple ink is my favorite, but much of my writing—except for correcting papers or notes I take during meetings—happens via my fingers on a keyboard.

I miss writing letters and receiving them. Even this year’s Christmas cards mostly contained only a dashed “love you” or a typed message about all that had transpired in a year—I admire people who send holiday cards at all—we haven’t for years—and I love charting the growing up of children in photos, but they don’t really count as letters for me.  I miss the kinds of letters where we work out what we think as we write them, where we pour out our hearts, trusting that the reader understands that strangely pulsing muscle in the center of our being. I miss finding a letter from a friend or student in my mail, punctuating the inevitable bills and circulars. I even miss my dad’s missives, scrawled in blue Flair pen on yellow legal pads, often containing an Ann Landers column or an article about Katherine Hepburn or Princess Diana, two of his idols.

I have come of age between two eras—the one when we wrote by hand and the one in which we live now where I tap, tap, tap letters on my laptop. I don’t need to wait for ink to dry.  I do, sometimes, have to wait for those three pulsing dots on a text—will the person respond?  Yes? No. But instantaneous communication, while good for things like what time a plane lands or could you pick up broccoli is less satisfying for the kinds of musings I am missing. Even this blog—Should I choose, I could post it almost instantly, though perhaps its quality would be improved if I waited, paused, re-read it in the morning.  I’m out of the habit of the waiting that letter writing and receiving requires.

In the bottom drawer of my desk upstairs are piles of letters. Marie Kondo might suggest I thank them for the pleasure they have brought and toss them. After all, do I want my children reading letters from people they never met? There are so many—from former students like my Laura, who was one of the best correspondents ever and whose loopy purple penmanship is instantly recognizable though she has been gone a long time now or from my dear friend Steven, also gone now, whose square, specific print revealed his designer sensibility, even in the way he addressed the envelope. His letters were filled with wit and kindness?  I had few beaux before my husband and even fewer who wrote to me, but Seth wooed me with letters, beautiful ones that I like re-reading from time to time.  His letters that convinced me I was enough—lovely enough, smart enough, funny enough—what a gift those letters were.  I would not mind my children reading those.  The others?  It feels sacrilegious somehow to throw them away.  Do I keep them to recall relationships that mattered to me, even if they were fleeting?  Perhaps.

A friend of mine who taught with me early in my teaching career lost his father unexpectedly. He quit his job and drove across the country.  My own brother’s death was still fresh enough that when my friend wrote to me about his breaking heart, I answered with long letters in which I tried to work out the puzzle for myself—though I believed it was for him—about what to do with all our love when the person we love so much leaves us forever.  They were not love letters; rather they were letters about love.  He introduced me to, among others, Thomas Merton, and we wrote back and forth for several years. I’d read his letters several times, thinking about what I might offer, how to stretch a thread of companionship from my life at a desk in a tiny greenhouse off of the bedroom of our apartment to his grief in a green SAAB a world away.  We do not see each other often and occasionally I’ll send him a text--You okay?—like casting a fishing line. Sometimes, he answers.  Sometimes, he doesn’t.

 Alone over spring break, I watched Jane Campion’s film, Bright Star, a beautiful story about two young people falling in love.  John Keats was penniless when he met equally impoverished Fanny Brawne; she was a flirt, a seamstress, a girl who loved dancing. He was a frail and serious brilliant poet. Few had any inkling of his greatness, including Fanny, who found poetry complicated and hard to understand. Marriage was impossible for the couple.  But love was not.  Love cannot governed by society’s rigid rules. Fairly early in the film, Fanny received a Valentine, and I recognized the feeling of her pulse speeding up as she opens the carefully rendered note only to discover it is from the wrong man, not from Keats but his patron, Mr. Brown. Her disappointment made me ache, the way only a much older woman aches in remembering what it is to be deep in crush or love or besottedness.  Love prevails; Fanny creates a butterfly garden in her room to remind her of their fragile, all-cosuming love—the act of creating the butterfly garden is so adolescent, so gorgeous, so over the top, and such a perfect way of showing how she can think of nothing but her love. Butterflies flit about, landing on her nightdress and her little sister’s fingers.  When she does not receive a letter from Keats, she is despondent. When she does, she holds it close, reading and re-reading it, as if she is holding him. Eventually—you already know the ending of this sad tale—Keats goes to Italy to try to cure his tuberculosis where he dies. Fanny is bereft, left to walk the heath reciting his exquisite verses for the rest of her life.  Alone in our TV room, I wept, listening to Keats’ words and sorrier, still, that he died, believing himself to be a failure. 

And from Keats, my mind jumps to those familiar verses from First Corinithians:

“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”

Growing up is not always all that it is cracked up to be.  Reminiscing feels like seeing through a glass darkly. I’m not sure I have ever put away childish things. I hope I never disparage the love those younger than I find all consuming.  Why do those of us who have lived longer think it appropriate to say condescendingly, “It’s just a crush.”  Are we so cynical or have we forgotten what it is to give oneself over to love, to risk being so vulnerable to another soul.  Another friend, who writes faithfully to his three daughters, as my own dad did, says he writes as much for himself as for his girls—that reminds me of why I write—to make sense, to share a question or a memory, to connect.  

I am glad Fanny had Keats’ letters to read; perhaps she didn’t read and re-read them. Perhaps it was too painful. I love reading old family letters, trying to imagine the daily lives of relatives I didn’t know—an uncle writing from the Beachhead at Anzio, an elegant aunt writing from Bar Harbor and Newport, a great-grandfather instructing his grandsons…we write to record, to put our thoughts down.  No one is going to lift this laptop from a pretty marble-papered box and read and re-read what I have written. But letters?  I think it’s time to bring them back.