Sunday 27 July 2014

Letters

This week's Booking Through Thursday is:

Different kind of reading … what do you think about letters? Do you ever send them anymore? Receive them? Or do you just do email and texts instead? Do you miss the days when people used to write letters?


I love letters! Reading old collections of letters, like Charlotte Brontë's, leaves you feeling as though you really knew the person as a close friend, rather than as an historical figure. I think it's wonderful to have access to such unfiltered, spontaneous thoughts and feelings, like reaching back through time and having a personal conversation with someone.

In terms of my own letters, I used to have the odd penfriend when I was a child, but with the growth of electronic (and instant) communication, it's become a bit redundant. I agree completely that an email or a text doesn't have anywhere near the warm, caring feeling of a letter, or the same sense of nostalgia when you look over them later, but when you think about the benefits of being able to communicate instantly and mostly for free with someone on the other side of the world, there's no comparison.

Sometimes I think it would have been nice to have lived in a simpler time, when we weren't bombarded with information 24/7, and could feel free to live our own lives without signing petitions about life in a country you've never been to, or having graphic images of wars and natural disasters shoved in our faces. Would I want to return to a time when, if your friends or family lived in a different country, you might only be able to speak to them once a year or so? No.

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