"No Letter Today" was the title of a once popular country and western lament. And that's what they're singing now at Canada Post. With the arrival of e-mail, texting, and other modes of instant electronic communication, the lovely old-fashioned custom of writing letters, sealing them in envelopes, adding stamps, and sending them by post may be following the flight plan of the dodo.
And this is a shame. On our shelves we have the collected letters of Hemingway, Steinbeck, Cheever, O'Hara, Thurber, Ogden Nash, Edna St. Vincent Millay, et al. And there is one wonderful book called "The World's Great Letters" that deserves the title, containing between its covers letters of, among others, Alexander the Great, Columbus, Leonardo Da Vinci, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, Napoleon, Beethoven, Poe, Lincoln, Byron, Darwin, and Sarah Bernhardt. There are also tributes to letters: William James said "As long as there are postmen, life will have zest."
So we have all these wonderful letters of the past, but who is going to collect e-mail correspondence? Okay, Steve Martin has published a collection of his tweets, but that has to be an anomaly. So while we brood on the vanishing art of letter writing, I know what I'm going to do: taking Fats Waller's advice, "I'm Going to Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter."
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P.S. (as we used to say when writing letters): Two people who did occasionally send letters to themselves, to prove that they were still there, were Scott Fitzgerald and Shostakovich.
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