passing notes

Back when I was in 9th grade, I had to take an economics class and every day the teacher sat at a desk at the front of the classroom and read to us directly from the textbook. My friends and I referred to him as Monotone Man because, well, not only was he reading to us directly from the textbook, he read in a flat voice completely without inflection for an hour every day. To say that this class was boring is a complete understatement — it was soul-crushing. To make up for the fact that we were being read to for an hour, I used to entertain myself by passing notes. Passing notes in class was always a risk, because there was always the chance of getting caught. This usually didn’t happen, because note-passers tend to develop systems of stealth which includes a general ability to gauge where the authority figure might be looking at any given time, but still, getting caught. It happened. And so it was that the day I was passing a note with my friend Jessie (who sat over a row and up a seat, so the delivery of the note involved tossing the note on Dawn’s desk and then having Dawn get Jessie’s attention and throw the note) and it said something like “Why do we even have this class? I can read the book on my own,” that the teacher looked up from his textbook-reading, saw what was happening, and confiscated the note. He read it. He stared me down in icy silence. He went right back to reading the textbook. There are worse punishments, of course, and I could tell you the story about how all of this leads directly to me failing driver’s ed the following summer, but that’s a very long story and not exactly related, so let’s move on.

Do kids in classes pass notes anymore or do they just send text messages to each other? I like texting and all, and have occasionally sent messages from painfully boring meetings (which may perhaps be the adult equivalent of painfully boring classes) but there’s something very ephemeral about it. I can delete a text message but it’s not possible to delete a note on paper. I mean, yes, I could tear it up or set it on fire or something, but if I don’t, it’s, you know, there. On paper. Forever.

I was thinking about the concept of personal archives. We often learn a lot about history by reading people’s letters, but people don’t really write letters anymore. Do you even know what a shame this is? How long has it been since you’ve gotten an actual handwritten letter in the mail? And what is the modern equivalent of letter-writing? Email? I hate email. I put up with it because it’s pretty much a necessary evil in today’s world, but I don’t really like it. Maybe because I use my email as a tool of convenience and not for true correspondence. Oh, I talk to people. I have conversations in all kinds of places. Over the phone, in my email and in a variety of online venues, but these are generally quick exchanges and not exactly substantive correspondence. There’s nothing wrong with that, and it’s kind of interesting to think about on its own: the fragmentation of the things I say across all these places (my blog, my email, text messages, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, IM, etc.) and how there are necessarily levels to it all. There are things I would write in an email that I’d never write on my blog, for instance. To a degree, when there’s so much public talking going on all the time, people have to differentiate between public and private somehow.

I’m not famous and I don’t have any desire to be, either. I don’t think I’d be able to handle it very well. But if I were, and someone were to become my biographer, say, where would this person get information about me? I could pull the plug pretty quickly on almost everything I’ve put online. Yeah, things get archived in other places, but in under an hour I could delete all of my accounts everywhere and pretty much disappear from the internet. I’m not going to, at least not today, though you have no idea how tempting this thought occasionally is. My point, though, is that this is all pretty impermanent. So if all of this were to disappear, what would my hypothetical future biographer do? I have some old journals, though I fell out of the habit of journaling a few years ago, and I have some letters. Now they’re not letters I wrote, of course, and I have no idea if anyone has ever kept any of the letters I’ve written so maybe those don’t exist anymore either, but I have letters other people have written to me, scattered throughout my things. And perhaps the subject matter of these letters would at least provide clues as to what was going on with me during certain times in my life.

I really do love everything about letters. There’s something so wonderful about checking the mail and finding a letter, something someone sat down and wrote because they thought to write to you. The information may be slightly out of date by the time the letter is received but even so, it’s a letter on paper that someone wrote. Letter-writing is necessarily a time-consuming activity, especially if you’re writing longhand, because you have to sit down with some paper and a pen and think about what you’re going to write and then write it. Writing a substantial letter — not a note, a letter — that is interesting enough for the other person to read, even, takes some time and some thought. And receiving one is nice. It’s just… nice. Because you know someone took the time to sit down and write something to you. It’s not that emails and @ replies on Twitter and blog comments and whatnot aren’t nice because they are (unless, of course, they’re not, and those happen too) and to a degree they signal the same thing, but let’s face it — handwritten letters are just, you know, cooler. (They also make things like this possible — what’s the alternative? Saving emails? It’s not exactly the same.)

I have a friend. (I do. I even have more than one. Whoa.) This particular friend lives in Australia and though he and I have never met in person, we met a long time ago back when LitKicks had message boards and he inexplicably called me “sir” which was kind of entertaining. Over time, we started sending things to each other in the mail, and oh, the letters. The letters are so good, you guys. We lost touch for a long time but reconnected just this year and picked up right where we left off (I am now the proud owner of a Steve Irwin action figure, complete with a crocodile). Jason writes really good letters and it’s always fun to get one. It’s fun writing them too. (I owe him one.) We could always just email, and we do, but sometimes it’s good being a little old-fashioned.

The art of letter-writing may be mostly dead, but that means it’s also slightly alive. That’s not too bad, I suppose.

Do you ever write letters to people? Would you if you knew the other person would write back to you?