Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

A quick swing through this blog-site or just a brief glance at my gravatar (what a stupid word) to the right will clue you into a fact: I like old, low-tech things. As an old, low-tech thing myself, I feel an affinity with the slower pace, the more thoughtful process they require. A clock requires winding. A pen requires filling. A letter requires consideration and preparation.

Letters…I know. How 19th century! But I write letters. I have always written letters. I communicated with distant cousins with letters. I wooed women with letters. I have built friendships with letters. To this day, I write letters to pen pals, to my father, and on occasion, to my wife. Letters take time. Letters make me slow down. Letters make me think about what I want to say before I put pen to paper, because you can’t backspace through a handwritten letter or cut-and-paste your way out of an awkward syntax.

In our world of instant communication—IMs, emails, tweets—even a phone conversation can seem old-fashioned. To set aside ten minutes or an hour for a chat is just too much effort for some people. Why? Why is it so much work (or too much bother) to plan some time with a friend or relative? How superficial do our relationships become when we reduce our interaction to 140-character bursts?

I’m not dismissing online communication, and some of my relationships have been greatly expanded through online contact, but a letter is a different thing.

A letter is hand-crafted, a tangible product of a friend’s effort to speak to you. Letters have an import, a gravitas that emails cannot match. And a relationship, built through letters, tends toward the intimate.

As I sit before the sheet of paper, pen in hand, I think of what my friend wrote to me, of how her life is going, and of what she has been doing. I consider my responses to the varied subjects upon which she touched. I craft my side of our conversation. I slow down. I think.

Then the pen is uncapped and the ink flows. The nib scratches and scuffles across the laid cotton paper. The ink delineates my words, in my hand, imprinting my unique stamp upon our correspondence. I slow the tempo of my thoughts, keeping pace with the words as they appear on the page. The paper is filled up, turned over, filled again. A new sheet comes into play. More thoughts, more words. I move from topic to topic, responding to her words, adding thoughts of my own. The letter hits nodes, seeks tangents, tells stories, lends support, laughs and cries.

It is a singular and distinct method of communication that I plan to continue until the day I lay my head down for the last time.

k