The New York Times’s “Draft” column began about 18 months ago with an essay by the novelist Jhumpa Lahiri on the power of sentences. It’s been going strong since. Its contributions run the gamut, from well-known writers like Lahiri, Colm Tóibín, Philip Lopate, and the like to newbies who sometimes sound silly or self-indulgent but who occasionally, as in a recent contribution from Mason Currey, get a mind to thinking.
Currey’s topic was the letter. We’ve all wrung our hands to dishrags with this one, bemoaning the loss of the elegant hand-written missive, the struggles of the postal service, the desolate future for archivists with no tattered physical correspondence to archive. I agree about the sadness of it all, because I am a child of my time. I wrote letters home every week, from summer camp and college and bumming around Europe and my various jobs and heartbreaks in…