Shopping for shower curtains today. Mine happens to be patently hideous and decked out with lots of gold tassels (mmm hmm.) that must have appealed to my tastes half a decade ago or so but at this point is an embarassing bathroom eyesore. At any rate - I'm perusing the Anthropologie website, checking out beautifully overpriced curtains, falling in love with cotton and vinyl in strange and wonderful new ways, theorizing about how much larger my tiny bathroom would feel with that crisp, white number hanging from the pole when I notice Anthropologie has a section of their website called "stationery."
As in: lovely pieces of paper upon which we might actually write (by hand!!) a letter to another person.
As in: slide that hand-written letter into a (matching!) envelope, add postage, and MAIL to someone special.
As in: someone special opens mailbox, gets confused about the hand-addressed item in the box that's neither Christmas card nor wedding invitation, wonders what credit card company has gotten particularly crafty about enticing you to open their 0% offer.
As in: what ever happened to the art of letter-writing? Of sitting down with a pad of paper and a pen and actually thinking about what you want to say before venturing into the "no-backspace-key" world of longhand.
As in: I think I'm going to demand that friends start writing me letters every now and then instead of emails or text messages.
As in: I have beautiful handwriting that doesn't get strutted out enough and maybe it's time people started getting unsolicited thoughts from me on STATIONERY.
Actually, all of this forces me to wax a little nostalgic about how the romantic notion of a love letter surely died a little in the era of email - or the notion is, at the very least, ailing. For as handy as it can be to have the blackberry blink at me when any of my dozen email accounts get a little love there's something absolutely less than romantic about handily receiving even the most beautifully-crafted email.
Maybe it's the glare of the screen that renders even the most tender thoughts a little remote.
Maybe it's the fact that we can create, re-create and re-re-create anything on the fly without assigning much forethought to what we'd like to say, how we'd like to say it, or how it will be received (not just prescriptively, but visually, emotionally, artistically). To speak nothing of my inevitable digression over the fact that our collective handwriting has becoming increasingly abominable, we're simply missing out on the singularly personal touch afforded by one another's inherently individual penmanship.
Maybe it's that I spend all day with fingers on keyboard and the greatest freedom from that particular hell would be to abandon computers altogether when I resign my daily post and insist on something more quaint, more intimate, less technological, less expected.
Maybe it's that I read something like this love letter from Tolstoy to his fiance, Valeria, and think how much more lovely it would be to read in it's original script:
I already love in you your beauty, but I am only beginning to love in you
that which is eternal and ever-precious: your heart, your soul. Beauty one could
get to know and fall in love with in one hour and cease to love it as speedily;
but the soul one must learn to know. Believe me, nothing on earth is given
without labour, even love, the most beautiful and natural of feelings
Nov 2, 1856
Now then: back to that shower curtain shopping...who knows what bygone tradition I'll end up invoking when it's time to replace my couch.
And a letter gives you something truly savable, for, like history! Our family's history after about 1999 is likely to be lost in a vast electronic dump. Writing--good.
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