"We need to write, otherwise nobody will know who we are."
-Garrison Keillor

Ethan's latest letter starts off wondering if I'm an eggnog man or not, and rolls quickly into: "So basically what's been on my mind the last few days is the issue of endurance." He and I have kept this conversation going for a few years now and I don't even remember what it was that I last wrote to him. It's not important. What is is that we're both alive, and that's very easy to forget when caught up in all the nonsensical correspondence of a typical day.

I avoid email mostly because each morning there are 20 or so new items of business to take care of. This business could be as minute as deleting a junk email or as complex as editing a submission to the magazine I work for. When I open that inbox I know the most pleasant news I will find will be word from a friend on what we might do that night after work, usually cut off with a "call me later."

With the advent of email, many people prematurely mourned the death of the written letter, citing all the wrong reasons. The importance of a letter isn't the quaintness of the paper, the quirks of handwriting, or the interesting stickers and stamps on the envelope. A real letter, electronic or otherwise, matters so much because of its intrusion on the daily nuisances. Somebody who cares about you thought to take some time to let you know. It serves no purpose other than to remind you that you both exist, that you are more than what the ticking minutes might have you believe.

Letters aren't written for anyone but the recipient. (There are those "open" letters, of course, and letters to the editor, but those are really just public opinion pieces in disguise.) When writing a letter you wear your true face. You are in love rather than writing about love. You are longing rather than analyzing longing. You have an idea but it's still too passionate to be put down logically for strangers. Letter writers aren't trying to convey wisdom of the ages, but a quiet affection, a fleeting thought of the moment, the way a breeze feels. This makes them our most important kind of writing. Our true history, the one without pretense or selfish motive, is in these mailed moments.

So I read letters a lot. Literature tells us of ideals of love and valor we probably can't achieve, while letters remind us of the inherent beauty in everything we do. It's so easy to feel alone and nuts in the world today, but letters give us a sense of camaraderie as we try to figure out how to live properly. And we're not simply following the cult of celebrity when we read letters, because the whole point of them is that they aren't prettified.

James Joyce was so flustered with love for his beloved Nora that he couldn't string any complete thoughts together, or even sign himself at all for want of knowing what to say. Harry "Give 'em Hell" Truman may be one of history's greatest war criminals, but he was also so scared before his emergency inauguration that he wrote home to ask his mother to visit as soon as she could. Van Gogh's famous letters to Theo jump back and forth between artistic melancholy and exuberance over new pieces of furniture in his room.

What we gain from all this correspondence is the best kind of knowledge--proof and record of the fact that we live for more than what is immediately in front of our eyes. It's also a reminder that nothing is easy and everything is beautiful and all of it is worthy of examination. Most importantly, though, all of it is worthy of sharing. We write to let others know we're here. We read to know that we have all been here, and that it was worth it.