There are few things as seductive as nostalgia. We know this just as well as the marketing professionals and politicians who peddle it, but that doesn’t mean we’re immune to its charms.
Take, for example, the handwritten letter.
When was the last time you opened your mailbox and found, amid the credit card offers and political fliers, a letter from an old friend or relative? Birthday cards and postcards don’t count – each is only slightly more time-consuming than a quick email. We’re talking about a multi-page letter, written with a pen on stationary or notepaper, that is sealed in an envelope – complete with a handwritten return address in the upper left corner – to be stamped, postmarked and delivered.
Do you remember the feeling of anticipation as you walked back to your house or apartment, letter in hand? Can you recall the joy (or heartache) you felt when you opened the letter to reveal the familiar flow of your correspondent’s handwriting?
It’s been awhile, hasn’t it?
In June, Monitor contributor Debra Marshall made a compelling case for the staying power of the handwritten letter.
One day, while thinning out the contents of several storage bins, Marshall came across hundreds of letters – bundle after bundle – that amounted to a deeply personal timeline. Among those many treasures was a letter written by her grandmother’s grandmother nearly a century and a half ago. Marshall wrote: “This one letter – four smallish sheets of paper, written on front and back – by itself tells me so much about my great-great-grandmother’s life as a young wife and mother that I couldn’t have possibly known any other way.”
Will future generations have to rely on archived Facebook posts, void of all intimacy, to get a sense of an ancestor’s day-to-day life? Will anybody buy a hardcover copy of The Collected Emails and Emojis of Taylor Swift?
Like the handwritten letter, handwriting itself is on the ropes.
On Sunday, the New York Times published an op-ed with the headline “Handwriting Just Doesn’t Matter,” in which writer Anne Trubek argues that there are “few instances in which handwriting is a necessity, and there will be even fewer by the time today’s second-graders graduate.”
She’s not wrong. As the tools of communication evolve, it’s getting harder to justify dedicating precious classroom time to something that feels increasingly archaic. But nostalgia being what it is, lawmakers are pushing back against anti-handwriting forces. Eleven states now mandate cursive instruction, and last year New Hampshire adopted legislation to “encourage” schools to keep handwriting as part of the curriculum.
There is data to support each side of the argument. Trubek herself points out that some experts believe the act of handwriting provides neurological benefits to children. But she also dismisses the same studies as a side show, pointing out that the real argument is cultural. Senators in Louisiana, Trubek writes, yelled “America!” to celebrate a vote restoring cursive to the public school curriculum “as though learning cursive were a patriotic act.”
We have no doubt that handwriting will be one of those educational issues that pops up from time to time, but we will put that debate aside for now. In the meantime, we offer this suggestion: Next time you sit down to write a “How are you?” email or text to a friend or relative, put away the phone, tablet or laptop, and grab a pen and paper instead. A few days later, somebody you care about will walk to the mailbox to collect the bills and junk mail, and find something they thought they would never see again. And they will smile.
For all its pitfalls, nostalgia can be pretty sweet.