Letters

Yesterday I went to the cinema and watched Her. I didn't hate the movie, I didn't love it either. I didn't think the story was that good. But there was something in the movie that I have to admit captivated me: Theodore Twombly, the main character (played fantastically by Joaquin Phoenix) is a professional letter writer. He writes letters for other people, love letters mainly, but also letters from children to their parents and letters between friends. He has a gift for it.

The notion made me wonder if this is currently a profession, and if it's not, whether it really will be one day. I find the idea fascinating and disturbing, beautiful and worrying.

Personally, I have not sent a letter, a real letter, in years. But every year, when I travel, I send post-cards to a few people. And I love the idea of letters, especially love letters. The physicality of them. An e-mail is not the same. I want something that I can touch, I want a physical object, something that another person has taken the time to write by hand, I want the handwriting, and the paper they chose. I want to open the envelope (because it's always exciting to receive mail) and take out the letter carefully and read it over and over, and know that it has been held by the person who sent it to me. I want them to feel the same when I write them back. More than anything I want something I can actually hang up on my wall, a reminder that someone thought of me.

Recently, one of the people I send post-cards to every year showed me the collection. I had forgotten many of them. A lot of what was written was routine, the same thing in each one, asking about how they were doing, telling them where I was when I wrote it. Nothing special in any of them, but special because every post-card says "I was far away, and I thought of you, and I wanted to tell you about where I am and what I have seen because I wish you could have been there and seen it too".

Theodore's letters raised many questions. Does the person receiving them know that it was Theodore that wrote them? Does the person who asks Theodore to write them read them before they are sent so that they know what they have said? How much does Theodore know about the people he writes about? Have they ever met in person? And, possibly because the idea of publishing the letters comes up in the movie, I had to wonder, who do a person's letters belong to? The person who sends them? The person who writes them? The person who receives them?

Writing is an act of nakedness. One exposes their own thoughts to others, their beliefs, their private worlds, their ideas. One risks being disliked or adored, being hated, being persecuted. Writing to someone is even more than that. Writing to someone is telling them you care about them, you took the time to form the words and think of what to say. Writing a letter is special because more thought goes into it than into a text or an e-mail. There are things I would only say in a letter, and I have many written in my notebooks, to many people. I write them when someone has hurt me, and I need to tell them, when someone has helped me, and I want to thank them, when I feel strongly about someone and I want them to understand. I don't send them. They hold too much of me and I am not brave enough, but sometimes I think that letters are the real diaries, the holders of the real secrets and the real feelings.