From Petrarch’s attempts to rationalise and communicate his heartfelt love in words that “a thousand pens are not yet weary of” (Canzoniere Sonnet 23), to Sidney’s sonnet sequence of Astrophil’s love for Stella, inspired by “look[ing] in thy heart and writi[ng]”(Astrophil and Stella, Sonnet 1), to “in verse my love to show”; to Shakespeare’s critiques on the value of “letters full of love” that “showed much more than jest”(V,II) in Love’s Labour’s Lost; to Austen’s Romantic ideals of the power of letters to “gradually [remove] all her (Elizabeth’s) former prejudices (of Darcy)”: throughout the history of the love letter, displays and announcements of love have rapidly altered as time has ticked on. Now, the age of internet, mobile phones and new technology has made communication cheaper, quicker and far more effective. We can simply talk to someone a million miles away at the touch of a button: instantaneous, free, fantastically liberating. But in this rise of communication potentiality, we have inevitably lost a world. A world of love letters where the written word was etched affectionately upon parchment, patiently contrived and conceived, beautifully eloquent and attentive to detail and emotion. Despite the innovation of the typed memo, we have certainly lost some of the beauty of communication as we now take for granted what was once so precious and meaningful.

Looking back with my mum over a box of love letters truly awakened me to the loss that we have suffered with this new rise of technological interaction. No longer can we trace back the memories preserved forever in fragments of paper that, like the grave of a lost-one, act as memento mori, a means of remembrance and immortalisation. Texts and emails, instant messages and snap-chats are fantastic in their instant gratification, yet they leave no physical trace of emotion, no substantial evidence that can be kept forever. Yes, one can follow back long lists and lines of Facebook chats, yet all these are merely ethereal and stored, quite literally, in a cloud.

We have undeniably gained in these new technological leaps towards progress; we have benefited from the speed, the practicality and the ease of technology, as well as the environmental benefits that promise future global sustainability. Yet, for me, a shameless lover of the written word, a believer in the power of materiality as evidence of emotion, we have not merely exchanged a traditional mode of address for technological updates: we have lost a world. We have lost souvenirs to safeguard, secrets to treasure, legacies to leave behind and the heritage of a letter stained in love that we can have and hold forever. The death of the love letter arguably marks much more than a technological shift: it portrays the loss of love itself. Texts and emails aren’t carefully composed with precarious pondering over each individual line and phrase, trying to write perfectly, eligibly, beautifully… they are mechanically contrived, filled-up with symbols and emojis, and tapped out rapidly on a tiny keyboard, not inscribed in ink. Thus, with the loss of the written word, with the death of the love letter, are we becoming loveless, less emotional, more mechanical and ultimately stepping towards a senseless robotic existence? Or is this merely the melancholy perception of a memorabilia-mad language-lover?

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