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Until relatively recently the letter was the prevalent means of correspondence in the West. However, the acceleration of technological advancements facilitating rapid communication has resulted in the posted missive being all but entirely usurped by electronic alternatives. Unquestionably a vital resource, electronic communication also facilitates the collapsing of time, space and – to some degree – social barriers. However, convenience and velocity come at a cost; the surfeit of email that we send and receive today is such that reading, let alone responding to one’s correspondence, becomes increasingly difficult. This problem is exacerbated by unsolicited messages, the superabundance of which overshadows and apparently diminishes the consequence of everything else received. An unintended outcome of this is the fact that electronic mail is rarely preserved; a fact that has negative consequences for those of us with an interest in studying the past. For email, like most electronic records, remains suspended in the ether and will eventually become inaccessible; flickering into extinction when the energy source that sustains it fails. My concern with the loss of the letter stems not from a misplaced sense of nostalgia regarding the ‘analogue’ world, but rather a general sense of unease with the disappearance of physical documentation. Now that our main mode of communication has migrated to an intangible format, words, sentiments and personal histories are jettisoned, never to be discovered by inquisitors of the future.

This preoccupation with the death of the epistle has to some extent been precipitated by my recent reading of the collected letters of Virginia Woolf. Her fascinating letters exemplify how, throughout the ages, letters have contributed to the construction of horological narratives, providing biographers and historians with material to resurrect the lives and works of personages from the past. In some cases, the collected correspondence surviving an artist amounts to a masterpiece of impressive stature in its own right, even when considered in isolation from whatever artwork they may have produced. This is, of course, demonstrated by the case of Vincent van Gogh, whose letters (which have been in print since the nineteen-twenties) reveal an intelligence and awareness that contradicts the prevalent portrait of the artist as deranged naif.

While the personal experiences, anecdotes and observations contained within a letter often prove informative, the date and location of a letter’s composition are equally decisive, providing records allowing the artist’s wanderings to be traced. In addition to their historical value the letters of antecedents can, in some cases, also provide us with encouragement in moments when despondency is at the door, when confidence, faith and enthusiasm are devoured in the abyss between the conception and realisation of bright ideas. The letters of Rainer Maria Rilke (now collectively published as Letters to a Young Poet) can offer an antidote to spells of disillusionment and melancholy. These letters, written between 1903 and 1908, when Rilke was himself an emergent, but prominent, poet, were addressed to another aspiring versifier and student who had sent Rilke poetry and requested guidance about becoming a writer. Though the two never met, Rilke wrote ten letters of empathetic exhortation to his postal companion. In doing so, he inadvertently produced a piece of compulsory reading for those legions who willingly endure all manner of difficulties in order to devote themselves to their art. In recent times I have found myself returning to these reassuring words: ‘You must not compare yourself to others (…) Work from necessity and your compulsion to do it (…) Work on what you know and what you are sure you love. Do not let yourself be controlled by too much irony (…) Live in and love the activity of your work (…) Be touched by the beautiful anxiety of life (…) Love your solitude and try to sing with its pain (…) Allow your art to make extraordinary demands on you (…) It is good to be solitary, because solitude is difficult (…) It is good to love, because love is difficult.’

In 1964 Marshall McLuhan wrote (in Understanding Media) that ‘we shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us’. We would do well to consider his message regarding technological determinism in our ahistorical digital age. The irrevocable demise of the art of the letter is an inevitable phenomenon in which all of us are inescapably complicit. What remains unsettled is how the physical extinction of these remnants of communication will impact upon the formation of biographies and other grand narratives. Letters like those mentioned above constitute more than ephemeral traces of transient lives. These letters, penned in most cases without full awareness of the importance they would assume, are sacred artefacts providing direct insight into the lives, times, and of course the work of the individuals who wrote them. Letters are essential elements in the retrospective authoring of mythology, without which art does not exist.