Love letter is a distinct way of storytelling. Unlike stories in general, love letter always happen in the present. That immediacy is created by the assumption built by the two person corresponding in love letters. They imagine facing each other in some kind of private haven. What they feel becomes what they write. Even when writing about the past, they tell it in present tenses. No wonder Goethe, a German literary giant, described love letter as the most immediate breath of life.
Love letter has two irreplaceable protagonists: you and I. Everyone else becomes secondary character. This is the intimacy that love letter offers: a world where you and I no longer exist. You and I are transported into another world, less painful and more colorful than the world you and I live in. In short, a world imagined by you and I.
Therefore, a correspondence of love letters is no different than an anthology of monologues. The temporal gap between each letter isolates the writers in their personal space. There is no other audience except themselves. The writers then could only speak out what they feel to themselves. The writers become the first audience of their works. Thus their days are spent in expressing themselves. For love letter writers, expression become the image of their own alienation.
—A re-edited fragment of my essay about love letter. The revision was made after a session of YOU'VE GOT MAIL (Nora Ephron, 1998) at 3 AM in the morning.
No comments:
Post a Comment