|, a researcher at the Glacier Think Bank Chen Jibing
I can't remember the last time I opened my home mailbox.
That may be a slight exaggeration. After all, I still receive some newspapers and publications every day, and I also receive some bills every three to five minutes.
So it would be more accurate to say that I can't remember when I last received a letter. I mean the kind of "letter" in the true sense of the word—handwriting, exchanging information, opinions, and emotions between individuals.
Figure/Figureworm Creative
I now wait every few weeks, wait for the mailbox to be almost full, and then open it to clean up again. I say "clean up" because most of the things I receive in the mailbox now are thrown away without looking at them. Even newspapers and magazines are getting fewer and thinner; bills are mostly electronic, and some utilities have to apply to them if you need paper bills.
At this time 15 to 20 years ago, my home mailbox would be packed for three days without opening. Now, it takes about three weeks to barely fill up.
01
Like the things that have disappeared from our lives over the years, the letterbox is now a mere mere fabric—though it may not be completely abolished for a while and a half, but if it really doesn't have it, it obviously doesn't matter much.
Things of similar nature include landlines, telegrams, faxes, business cards, etc., which are all mediums of human communication, the birth of the Internet has announced their end, and the rise of instant messaging tools based on mobile phones has further pronounced their doom.
However, paper letters are still fundamentally different from telephones, telegrams, faxes, etc., the latter are typical "modern products", which have been born for more than a hundred years at most, and there is no essential difference with WeChat and Douyin.
Myself included, I hardly hear anyone sentimental about their being iterated on by more efficient mediums. But the demise of thousands of years of letters will be a significant event in human history.
▲Poster of the movie "Love Letter" (Photo/Network)
Because the letter is not only used to convey practical information and solve real problems, it connects the emotions between two vivid individuals at both ends of the mail route.
For countless people in past generations, that little mailbox once held all their life expectations and hopes. They are the soldiers who rushed to Beijing to take the examination, the lovers who were separated from each other in a foreign land, the literati doctors who were degraded in the border areas, and the soldiers who fought horses outside the Country...
Didn't the poet Yu Guangzhong have such a famous sentence: "When I was a child / Nostalgia is a small stamp / I am here / Mother is on that end ..."
02
One night last week, my boyhood friend Ann suddenly told me on WeChat that she had just overheard an old song by Liu Wenzheng, and her eyes were a little moist. At that moment, she, who now lives in Zurich, Switzerland, strongly wanted to greet me.
Ann's words instantly transported me back more than 30 years, when I was studying at Tongji University in the northeast corner of downtown Shanghai, and she was at a school in Nanshi that now takes the subway, which is basically no more than half an hour away. However, she and I only met once in a few months and corresponded every week.
Ann and I were not lovers, and although we were very good at a very young age, we never had that kind of male-female relationship. I've even forgotten what was written in so many of the letters between us at the time, and if I reread it now, it would probably be boring.
But I will always remember the eager anticipation I had every time I went to the letter box bar on the south side of the gate of Tongji University to get a letter, and the satisfaction when I received my letter and the loss when I couldn't receive it. This, of course, included letters from Ann.
In an era when telephones were neither widespread in the city, the deep attachment of my classmates to that small mailbox was obviously a hundred times greater than mine.
So much so that nearly a decade ago, when someone proposed to set up a weChat group for a university class, the group name that all students unanimously thought of was "Tongji 8611" - "86" represented the year we entered the school: in 1986, "11" was the number of our major, and together it was the code name of our grade and major. But the reason we've been haunted by it for decades is because it represents a mailbox.
I wonder if the row of mailboxes carrying countless parents' fist-and-fist expectations, classmates' encouragement and sweet love is still standing there suddenly? Maybe it has completed its historical mission and "gloriously retired"?
But when I told my little friend Ann about "8611," she remembered it instantly. Among my friends, I remember the string of "8611" far more than just Ann. This string of ordinary numbers leads to a period of innocent friendship of youth.
The information contact from Shanghai to Zurich today is more convenient and timely than the information contact from Wujiaochang to the Old Town 35 years ago, but what we have lost is the long expectation and concern of the past. While improving the efficiency of information dissemination and exchange, instant messaging tools have also rudely deleted the various changes of ideas and emotional twists and turns that fermented in the past waiting process.
The same is communication, face-to-face conversation between two people and online conversation in front of the mobile phone, although they are instant communication, but the nature will be very different; and mutual letter writing, which has both spatial barriers and time delays, is even more completely different.
Most of the time, after a few days or even longer of precipitation, people's first instinct after receiving a message will fade, and the final feedback of the information is much richer and more delicate.
This is why epistles became an important genre in ancient times.
03
Today, perhaps few people have read through the "Records of History", and I have to admit that I myself do not, but many people are catchy about sima Qian's famous words in the Book of Baoren'an (Shaoqing) ("King Gaiwen acted in "Zhou Yi"; Zhongni'er wrote "Spring and Autumn"; Qu Yuan exiled and gave "Leaving Sorrow"; Zuo Qiu was blind and had "Chinese"; Sun Tzu's feet were on his feet, and the "Art of War" was revised; Bu Wei Qianshu, the hereditary "Lü Lan"; Han Fei imprisoned Qin, "Speaking Difficulty" and "Lonely Anger"; "Three hundred poems", which were mostly the works of the sages who were angry. This person is depressed and must not pass through his way, so he recounts the past and thinks about the comings...");
There may be even fewer people who know about Song Lian's people and his deeds today, but his "Sending Dongyang Horse Life Sequence" is almost well known; as for Huanghuagang Yishi Lin Juemin's "Letter with Wife", it has become a revolutionary history textbook...
Imagine if human beings had instant messaging tools from the beginning of civilization, would history have left these immortal texts that were popular at that time and passed down for generations to come? And those "Hongyan Chuanshu" and "Flying Pigeon Affection" and other stories related to letters and letters related to the hero Haojie and the love of his children will not have it.
▲ Lin Juemin's "Letter with Wife" (Photo/Fujian Museum)
Without letters, the whole of human history would have been unrecognizable.
So, what about the future? One might argue that it is only the medium that has changed. That is to say, a letter has changed from being written on paper, traveling near or far, taking days or weeks, and mailing to the recipient, to a storage space that is now written on a computer or mobile phone, over the Internet, and sent to the other party instantaneously, that is, e-mail (E-mail). In their view, the nature and content of letters as a medium of information exchange have not changed in this process.
Coincidentally, the year 2021 that just passed coincided with the 50th anniversary of the birth of email. It has penetrated into everyone's life for half a century, and modern offices are especially inseparable from it.
People who have worked in multinational companies should be particularly impressed by this, compared to Chinese who are already accustomed to instant messaging tools such as QQ and WeChat, Western white-collar workers prefer e-mail. It's so important that I've seen specific discussions in The Anglo-American press about the norms and etiquette of email.
At the moment, my own email address is also open, which is a habitual action that must be done every morning after opening the computer in the office. I was also often desperate for the mountains of "unread mail" and "spam" that piled up there, and every once in a while I had to make a lot of effort to clean it up. In a way, it does have similarities with mailboxes in the past, especially the annoying little ads that strangers crammed in...
But now, when I sit at my desk every day and open my email, will I still have the same eagerness in my heart when I opened that 8611 mailbox 35 years ago?
I suspect that the vast majority of people in the world, like me, don't talk at length about things that have nothing to do with specific work in e-mail, let alone with instant messaging tools. And we also know that neither email nor social networks are suitable for expressing thoughts and emotions that have been precipitated over a long period of time. Contrary to the superficial views of the techno-optimists, changes in medium and form inevitably lead to profound changes in content and substance.
Of course, I've never been a sentimental nostalgic person. At the moment, as I write this elegy for the vanishing letters and mailboxes, I am not trying to keep their thoughts alive. Not only them, but many of the good things in our lives fade away, and what we have to do is not to keep them in vain. This is neither possible nor necessary.
But I want to evoke a sense of self-consciousness that when we embrace something new, we should always think about what we have lost for it. We should not easily forget that they once existed beautifully.