#12 The importance of writing a letter
March 18, 2020 was an important moment in the historic pandemic we lived through. In Portugal, the President of the Republic declared a state of emergency in prime time, the first of three similar messages we heard at the pace of two weeks. On the same day, about two hours earlier, German Chancellor Angela Merkel addressed her fellow citizens, also on television, calling for unity to face a historic challenge. In her serious and thoughtful tone, the Chancellor also found a personal word:
"We all have to find ways to express affection and friendship: by Skype, with a phone call, by e-mail and maybe even by writing a letter. After all, the mail is still being delivered".
Among the forms of solidarity and closeness within reach, Merkel called for letters to be written.
It's common to hear from the pre and postgraduate generation that writing letters is very 80's - the decade before her birth representing a time before her, historically already very distant.
What is relevant, then, in an asynchronous form of communication these days, when not responding to a chat message is to pass to irrelevance and oblivion? How can a letter be relevant to talk about a pandemic that seems to change from hour to hour?
The benefits of expressive writing (in the form of a letter or diary entry) have been much studied in psychology, associated with positive effects on health, from decreased anxiety to improved sleep quality. The work of James Pennebaker since the early 1980s is a good example of this research.
In addition to these works, epistolary exchange is an ancient social practice of private communication, and also an important cultural phenomenon, as evidenced by the continuous re-edition of the correspondence between writers, thinkers, artists or intellectuals that mark our cultural history. The permanent fascination of the exchanges of letters between these people is the promise to glimpse the human side of those who write and read: Van Gogh's precarious fragility in the letters to his brother Theo, the intellectual affinity that soon became more between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, or Hermann Hesse's response to the young Peter Weiss, advising him on a path at the crossroads where he found himself: "He certainly has talent, both as poet and artist. His drawings seem more mature and independent than his texts. I imagine that he achieves fulfilment and recognition as a painter more quickly than as a poet". In fact, it was as a writer that Weiss would come to be recognized, one of the most important German authors in exile in the 20th century.
The correspondence of great names, however, is not always addressed to their peers, nor is it about existential issues. This is the case of a small set of twenty-three letters discovered at the end of almost a century and first published in 2013.[1] The author is Marcel Proust, who addresses them to his neighbour Mme. Williams, the wife of a dentist whose office is right over the writer's house. A torment of noise for the fragile Proust, from an early age, confined to the apartment, not by a pandemic, but by poor health.
What are these letters about, then, travelling from one apartment to another between two neighbours who will never have met? Written between 1909 and 1916 they testify to the cordiality between two people who share the health problems that afflict them, the consolation she finds in music (Mme. Williams plays the harp) and him in the writing of In search of lost time, which begins to be published in 1913 and for which the neighbour shows genuine interest: "May my book have given her as much pleasure as I had when reading your letter. (p. 54)
In these letters, we read the kindness of Proust, who wants to win for the cause of silence an ally with the power to stop the noise of the upstairs apartment, which bothers him so much sleep and work. Among the many references to the noise that comes to his apartment, Proust writes about the works in the apartment about his, in the absence of Mme. Williams: "Generally a painter, especially in buildings, believes it is his duty to cultivate himself at the same time in the art of Giotto and Reszké. The latter keeps quiet, while the electrician hammers. I imagine that on his return, you will find around him nothing less than the frescos of Cistina". (pp. 66-67)
Isolated in their homes, these neighbours are no strangers to the surrounding reality. In October 1914, the letters speak of the war, of the "terrible hours in which we fear for all we love" (p. 42), or of the constraints it imposes on the writer and the publication of his opus magnum: "The war has arrived, the second and third volumes could not be published, of course. (p. 46)
The letters continue, for no other purpose than the very pleasure of writing and the contentment of seeing it appreciated by the interlocutor: "By the grace of your generosity — or by a game of reflexes — you grant my letters some of the qualities that yours have. Yours are charming, enchanting at heart, in thought, in style and in talent". (p. 46)
Reading these letters from Proust to Mme. Williams in time of pandemic is witnessing how isolation can inspire eloquence and how the pleasure in word and play of this resonance helps to mitigate loneliness.
Now that the pandemic seems to be giving way and the "stay at home" is giving way to deconfinement, communication at a distance is less necessary because face-to-face meetings are already happening. However, the consequences of long weeks away from social life take longer to overcome. This is still the time to take advantage of expressive writing, either by reading or rereading the correspondence of figures who inspire us or by experimenting with writing to another, who may be our older self, what it is like to survive the pandemic in 2020.
Ana Margarida Abrantes
Coordinator of the Degree in Applied Foreign Languages, Lecturer in the Degree in Psychology, Member of the Board of FCH
[1] Proust, Marcel. 2013. Lettres à sa voisine. Avant-propos de Jean-Yves Tadié. Paris: Gallimard.