I'm not crazy about email.
There, I've said it. In Silicon Valley, of all places. Uh-oh. What's next? A thunderbolt and lightning in response to heresy against the niftiest innovation since sliced bread? Will the word "DINOSAUR" appear in 24-point letters next to my name in the great database in the sky?
I use electronic mail, all the time. It's handy, efficient and immediate. We can do all kinds of impressive things with it: Communicate with people around the world instantly and cheaply; update the members of a committee without having to rely on a telephone tree; submit and edit a document and talk about the revisions without exchanging a spoken word. It's a great invention, all right.
There's just something so transient, so careless and noncommittal, so ... lazy about it.
A high school chum and I have kept in touch with each other by mail for 30 years. I mean the old-fashioned kind. Here's how it goes: leafing idly through all the ads and bills and catalogs that proliferate in our lives, you recognize, with a flash of pleasure, a familiar return address on an envelope. You turn the letter over in your hands, feeling its weight (there must be snapshots or an article or a cartoon inside). You open it with anticipation and sit down with a cup of coffee, the letter in your hands. You look for the salutation ("Hello!" or "Dear friend ... "), and read and digest each sentence, envisioning the images conjured by the words.
The thing about a written letter is that its author had to take some time and thought and effort to commit the words to the page. An ongoing, hard-copy correspondence with a friend is like that rarest of pleasures, a conversation in which the other person is really listening.
My friend is a better writer than I am. I've kept almost all of the letters I have received from her over the decades, through childbirth and growing families and travel and marital strains and professional struggles. Although we've only seen each other a few times in all those years, her written words have been a bridge that brings me closer to her heart and her mind than the casual conversation of everyday contact--or email--ever could. They have been one of the great gifts of my life.
Biographer Willard Sterne Randall tells us that Thomas Jefferson left behind 28,000 signed letters that we know of. He also served as Governor of Virginia, President, Vice-President, Secretary of State and America's ambassador to France; studied Latin, Italian, Greek and French; wrote the Declaration of Independence; designed his house at Monticello; conducted dozens of breakthrough botanical experiments; invented numerous labor-saving devices; ran a large plantation; raised his motherless family and entertained friends constantly. (And we don't have time to write?)
Queen Elizabeth I once chided, in writing, a recalcitrant cleric: "Proud Prelate: You know who you were before I made you what you are now. If you do not immediately comply with my request, I shall unfrock you.--ELIZABETH" (POW!) She is vividly alive in that letter, regal, imperious, and annoyed. It's impossible to imagine that kind of incisive language in 20th-century email, which frequently arrives in hasty, abbreviated phrases, punctuated with dashes, and is by its very nature as fleeting as a breeze. We get the message with email, of course. But we don't get much else.
Well, with every technological advance, something's lost and something's gained. What we've gained with email is obvious. What we've lost is perhaps less obvious: the elegance of carefully crafted language, the mental exercise of initiating thoughtful and deliberate communication and finding the right words to say exactly what we mean, a vehicle for conveying things in our lives that matter more than a rescheduled meeting, the art of penmanship.
I really do sound like a dinosaur, and I notice that the flap on the cute little animated envelope at the top of my screen next to the "Send and Receive" icon is opening and closing. It will go on opening and closing, mindlessly and monotonously, into eternity or until my computer dies, unless I do something about it. Excuse me. I think I have some mail.
Cupertino, California Since 1947
