Our book today is Thomas Mallon’s 2009 love-letter to letters, Yours Ever, and it was brought to my mind by the sudden realization that I myself am now finished with postal correspondence. A good friend of mine, a little old lady who reviews the same novel every week for the Silver Spring Scold, has moved out of the little book-filled apartment where she’s lived since the Crimean War (she’s gone into managed care, where a strapping young live-in nurse will make sure she eats her vegetables), and although she and I haven’t exchanged “snail mail” letters in many years, it was to that old now-vacated address of hers that I sent a stream of such letters, in the last years of Life Before Email.

That Life Before Email is given a great narrative testimonial in Mallon’s book, which is far more than a simple anthology of letters – instead, it’s a running chronology and biography of all the things letters were to the people who wrote them, grouped under such broad headings as “Friendship,” “Confession,” “War,” and of course “Love,” and it’s extremely touching that he’s bookish enough to both start and finish his account with references to one of the greatest snail-mail correspondents of them all, our old friend Charles Lamb:

Letters have always defeated distance, but with the coming of e-mail, time seemed to be vanquished as well. It’s worth spending a minute or two pondering the physics of the thing, which interested Charles Lamb even early in the nineteenth century. Domestic mail was already a marvel – “One drops a packet at Lombard Street, and in twenty-four hours a friend in Cumberland gets it as fresh as if it came in ice” – but in his essay “Distant Correspondents” (1822), Lamb seemed to regard remoteness and delay as inherent, vexing elements of the whole epistolary enterprise. Considering the gap between the dispatch and receipt of a far-traveling letter, he wrote: “Not only does truth, in these long intervals, unessence herself, but (what is harder) one cannot venture a crude fiction, for fear that it may ripen into a truth upon the voyage.”

He references lots of other people too, from Oscar Wilde to F. Scott Fitzgerald to the irrepressible Mitford Sisters (another titan of letter-writing, the Dutch humanist Erasmus, is entirely ignored, a fact that will hardly surprise his two or three living partisans), always threading his narratives through rapid-fire quotations of their letters rather than simply block-quoting. That way, we get deliciously dense paragraphs like this one when he’s discussing another champion letter-writer, Lord Byron:

Eight years after his famous swim across the Hellespont, Byron can inform his friend John Hobhouse that he has now swum “from Lido right to the end of the Grand Canal” – though in a modest P. S., he notes: “The wind and tide were both with me.” Shelley, by contrast, cannot swim at all, a fact that Byron imparts to the publisher John Murray on May 15, 1819. Three years later he will be posting news of Shelley’s drowning and funeral to Thomas Moore, composing his famous description of the pyre (“All of Shelley was consumed, except his heart, which would not take the flame”) only after he has described his own sunburn: “I have suffered much pain; not being able to lie on my back, or even side.” The difference is simple: he is alive and Shelley is dead. He writes one letter to Moore at four a. m., while “dawn gleams over the Grand Canal, and unshadows the Rialto. I must to bed; up all night – but, as George Philpot says, ‘it’s life, though, damme it’s life!’”

Any veteran letter-writer will be nodding as they read that mention of how the fact that dawn is breaking after a long night in no way means the letter-writing should be postponed. No, snail-mail letters were atmospheric creations, meant as much to capture the moments of their inscription as to tell the tale of their tidings. I wrote letters to that little old lady while riding on buses, while stalled on the subway, while reveling in the stateliness of Bates Hall, while sitting in an endless succession of waiting rooms, and in new apartments surrounded by a hundred unopened boxes of books. And in return I got letters written in cafes, in parks, and on journeys far and wide. Without any sense of contradiction or superfluity, we would telephone each other in order to announce that we’d just posted a nice long letter, and a demographic entirely raised on email and Skype will have no ready realization of the sharp surge of joy that used to accompany getting one of those letters in the mail. Suddenly, in the midst of the strife and disappointment of the day, a distant friend was right there with you, in a tactile immediacy (a few days before, they had hand-written the words you’re reading, sometimes pausing to tap the pen on their teeth, or pet a cat, or look out a window) that emails, however miraculous, don’t share. It’s a quality that was put quite centuries ago, by Heloise writing to poor maimed Peter Abelard:

If a picture, which is but a mute representation of an object, can give such pleasure, what cannot letters inspire? They have souls; they can speak; they have in them all the force which expresses the transports of the heart; they have all the fire of our passions, they can raise them as much as if the persons themselves were present.

Yours Ever captures great swathes of that epistolary passion as no other book I know quite does (the hack reviewer for the Los Angeles Times gets the prize for best blurb: “Puts the belle back in belles-lettres”), and it made for bittersweet re-reading this morning. Not bittersweet for any explicit loss – after all, that little old lady and I email several times every day, as I do with a great many of my former snail-mail correspondents. Email is instantaneous; email carries with it none of the agonizing frustration of waiting for the mail; email can include photos (and those photos don’t – won’t ever again – require walking to the photo shop, dropping off the film, and waiting until you have pictures; no more specifying that you want double-prints specifically so that you can send some in letters); email is superior, plain and simple, to the lumbering process it replaced. But I loved that process, and I was very good at it, and it was bittersweet to think that the new tenants of that space my friend vacated will never know the sublime joy of getting a letter in the mail.