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DEDICATION

To the letter writers

To those among us who understand that, while historians may concentrate on coronations and battles, it is to the letter writers that we must turn when we want to truly understand. Like the journals and private papers of the classic gossips and diarists—Pepys, Boswell, Saint-Simon—the function of letters is “to reveal to us the littleness underlying great events and to remind us that history once was real life.” For it is in letters that history and biography meet, to form the most intimate of all forms of literature.

Some have said that the theater is what literature does at night. If so, then letters are what the creators of such literature do and think in the evening of their thoughts. For it is there, in the darkened, innermost recesses of one's mind, well behind the glare of superficiality and trivia, that our passions, desires, and truest selves reside. G. K. Chesterton once described the mailbox as “a sanctuary of human words,” adding that “a letter is one of the few things left entirely romantic, for to be entirely romantic, a thing must be irrevocable.”

Finally, this book is for the person who understands the true significance of letters; who appreciates the fact that it is upon the page of personal correspondence that the true soul of a human being is revealed and preserved in a fashion that makes them always present, oblivious to the ravages of time. It is here that one finds empathy with what Heloise wrote to her beloved Abelard:

What cannot letters inspire? They have souls; they can speak; they have in them all that force which expresses the transports of the heart; they have all the fire of our passions. They can raise them as much as if the person themselves were present. They have the tenderness and the delicacy of speech, and sometimes even a boldness of expression beyond it. Letters were first invented for consoling such solitary wretches as myself! Having lost the substantial pleasures of seeing and possessing you, I shall in some measure compensate this loss by the satisfaction I shall find in your writing. There I shall read your most sacred thoughts.

— John Little and Linda Lee Cadwell