Last week I read Taki’s Magazine for the first time in awhile, and I’m glad I did.  The magazine’s owner and editor, Taki Theodoracopulos, wrote a piece entitled “A Love Letter to Love Letters,” about—in case it wasn’t clear—love letters.

I was on a letter writing kick a few years ago, as The Age of The Virus granted ample time to indulge in time-consuming hobbies.  I am still a proponent of writing handwritten letters, though I have not written nearly as many lately.

Taki’s piece, however, quite eloquently explains the appeal of writing letters.  While he focuses on love letters, his arguments apply to letters generally.

Here is the crux of Taki’s apologia for love letters:

Well, a woman is a person a man writes love letters to, and if this sounds very old-fashioned to emoji users, that’s just too bad. Defying modernity is the coolest of the cool, so if any of you young whippersnappers out there are having female problems, just sit right down and write her a love letter. The power of the love letter is incredible, and no member of the weaker sex has ever been able to resist it. And no member of the fairer sex has ever sold the love letter short. In fact, I shall go as far as to call the love letter the neutron bomb of heterosexual, romantic sex.

“Defying modernity is the coolest of the cool”—very true.  It’s why young people are co-opting Catholic imagery and becoming (or at least pretending to become) Catholic (or, if they really want online street cred, Orthodox).  Beyond picayune fashion, however, letter writing is like giving a middle finger to postmodernity; what could be more punk rock than that?

As for the love letter being “the neutron bomb of heterosexual, romantic sex,” I’m not so sure, but in that nuclear hyperbole is a massive grain of Truth:  a handwritten letter is a special, simple, but totally unique gift, capturing a sentiment or feeling or snapshot of a relationship (romantic or platonic) for a moment in time.  Writing letters takes an act of focus and reflectiveness, but as Taki points out, it mustn’t be too thought out; it should flow from the heart.

There’s also great joy in receiving a letter.  I wrote many letters to a former girlfriend, and she loved receiving them; they’d often arrive in the middle of a difficult workweek (and aren’t all workweeks difficult now?), and boost who through another miserable shift.  I have a friend who sends out tons of letters around Valentine’s Day; receiving one of her cards is always a nice reminder of what Valentine’s Day should be.

Of course, like everything now, who has the time?  But therein lies the additional charm of the letter in the rat race of the twenty-first century:  writing a letter by hand—when we could easily have AI conjure up a “letter” for us, ready to copy-paste into an impersonal e-mail—takes time and originality and creativity.  The very act of sacrificing those in the interest of bringing a bit of joy to someone else is the charm of writing letters.

So grab a good pen, some stationary, some stamps, and your address book, and commence a-writin’!