Translator: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Queenie Lee
Years ago, I discovered treasure.
Treasure in my own backyard.
My husband and I had just bought a house.
It was a wreck of a house.
It had half a roof, no working plumbing, no working heating,
but it was a beautiful wreck of a house.
It had high ceilings, and seven fireplaces,
and a winding staircase up the middle of it.
And it had a backyard.
Now, for years, the neighbors to this backyard
had basically used it as their dumping ground.
So, the backyard was full of trash and lots of overgrown weeds.
One of my first projects was to go into the yard and clear it out.
When I was clearing it out,
I discovered there was a shed in the backyard.
It was one of these old sheds
with a corrugated tin roof, and plywood walls, and a torn screen door.
And inside the shed, I found a steamer trunk.
One of these huge steamer trunks -
the kind that heiresses in Edith Wharton's novels
take when they travel around Europe for eight months.
And it was in that trunk that I discovered treasure.
When I opened it up, I found letters.
Hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds of letters.
The letters in the trunk were addressed to a Mrs. Addie Bernheimer Seligman.
I did a little research, and I found out Addie was born in 1856, in New York City.
In 1878, Addie got married to Dewitt Seligman.
It was June 5, 1878, and I know that because amongst all the letters,
I found an old New York Times with the wedding announcement in there.
Addie had three children.
She had two daughters, Ethel and Alma, and then her third child was a boy.
A boy named James.
Most of the letters in the trunk
were letters that James had written to his mother.
Now, I don't know if her daughters never wrote to her,
but I do know she didn't keep those letters.
She kept the letters of James.
Letters from when he was four years old and first practicing his handwriting -
it was so sweet: "Now, Momma, what do you think of my Ps and Qs?" -
up until the 1930s when Addie died.
My favorite letters, in this whole huge trunk of letters,
were the letters that James wrote home to his mother from 1908 to 1912,
when he was at Princeton.
These letters are absolutely charming and full of life.
He was a wonderful letter writer and he wrote to his mother,
not once, not twice,
but sometimes three times a day.
Now, the mail went twice a day back then,
so a letter he posted in the morning at Princeton Junction,
could get to his mother in New York City by that evening.
And the letters that he wrote were just really delightful recountings
of what it was like to be at Princeton.
And for James, it was great.
He loved it.
Even the hazing - he described the hazing as a bully.
He talked about the basketball games and the football games.
He talked about going to lectures given by Woodrow Wilson
and how enjoyable they were.
He talked about reading Charles Dickens for the first time
and how much he loved Dickens.
Now, this was a boy after my own heart.
And, you know what?
I did fall in love with James. I fell in love with him.
I was a young mother then. I had three kids under the age of six.
I had a teenage stepdaughter who lived with me.
I had a part-time job.
I had a house to renovate.
And yet, every day, I made time to read the letters of James.
Because when I read his letters, I could escape.
I could be in college again, hanging out with this really fun guy.
Now, fast forward about 14 years, and my oldest son is going off to college.
So I said, "Peter, are you going to write to me
the way James wrote to his mother?"
He looked at me and he said, "Sure, I'll write to you, but why?
Why is it so important to you?"
And that really got me thinking.
Why is it so important to me?
Letters, why are letters so important to me?
Why is it important I have James' letters?
Why did I want Peter to write to me?
Addie Seligman saved all those letters.
She not only saved them, but on every envelope
she would write little notes about when she received the letter
and maybe something about the letter inside.
On one of those envelopes in her trunk, I found an inscription that said,
"No one to read this letter, ever."
And the "ever" was underlined.
How long do you think I waited before I read that letter?
(Laughter)
I really respect the privacy of letters,
but these people had been dead a long time,
and I loved James, and I needed to know what was in that letter.
So, I opened it up and I started reading it.
It was from the 1920s,
and James had written it while he was traveling in Europe.
And he had run into his cousin, Peggy.
Peggy Guggenheim.
Yes, the Penny Guggenheim whose father went down in the Titanic
and left her tons of money and made her a millionairess.
And she spent her money on art, and on artists,
and she founded a museum in Venice.
And James wrote to his mother about seeing Peggy,
saying, "Ran into Peggy chaperoning a weird looking guy
who may or may not be the father of her child."
Well, I guess that was a big scandal in the 1920s,
and Addie wanted to make sure that no one ever read about this.
So why didn't she throw the letter out?
Why did she save it?
I know why she saved it.
She saved that letter because she wanted to have that connection to her son,
she wanted to have that bridge between the two of them, always there.
So that even when he wasn't with her, he was with her.
He was with her through the letters.
Because letters are a bridge.
They are a physical connection between the person who writes the letter
and the person who receives it.
There are senses involved in getting a letter.
When I get a letter from my son Peter,
I see him in his handwriting.
I recognize that handwriting: the looping Ls and the really crowded Os.
I can smell the piece of paper and just catch a whiff of Peter.
I can feel the piece of paper,
and I'm feeling the same paper, touching exactly what he touched,
just like when I hold James Seligman's letters,
I'm touching the same place that he wrote on 100 years ago.
Do you want a thrill?
You go 40 minutes up I95 to the Beinecke Library at Yale.
You give them a photo ID, you sign a piece of paper,
they take a little picture of you, and they let you in,
and you can touch, and see, and read, and feel letters.
Letters were written by James Baldwin, W.E.B. Du Bois, Alfred Stieglitz,
Georgia O'Keefe, Lou Reed, Charles Dickens -
I have held the letters of Charles Dickens in my hand,
I've had a physical connection to this writer that I love so much.
But letters are not only a bridge to famous people from the past.
They are not only a bridge to the people we love so much who are far away.
Letters are a bridge to the past,
to people we only know about because of the letters they wrote.
In the mid-1800s, there were two women
who lived in and around Hartford, Connecticut.
Addie Brown was from a poor family; she hadn't been very well educated.
She became friends with Rebecca Primus,
who was from a prominent, well-established Hartford family.
The women were very good friends,
and then they became physically intimate with each other.
Now, Addie had to leave Hartford quite often for jobs -
she worked in Waterbury, she worked at Miss Porter's School for a while.
She worked as a seamstress, a maid, and taking care of children.
But she and Rebecca wrote back and forth to each other
to maintain the connection, to maintain a bridge.
And the letters are really very lovely,
very eloquently written.
Sadly, Addie died in her late 20s.
Rebecca died 62 years later.
And when she died,
the over 100 letters that Addie had written to her
were found in her desk.
She had saved them all those years.
Those letters are now at the Connecticut Historical Society,
where I read them.
And I got to know both of these women through these letters.
There was a connection between us.
And it was physical.
I held those letters; I saw Addie's beautiful handwriting.
In one of the letters, Addie has added a postscript.
She says, "Look carefully at the corner, I kissed the edge of the paper.
Touch there and you'll touch my lips."
Now, I held that piece of paper - I couldn't see the imprint -
but I touched that corner.
And I touched that place
where Addie had placed her lips in love for her friend, Rebecca.
I could tell by all the folds in the letter
that it had been folded over, and over, and over again.
And I think that Rebecca kept it in her pocket
so she could always carry that around with her: that special letter.
Now, how could they write of love like that between each other?
How could they know that their love would be secret, and protected, and safe?
Because letters are a private form of communication.
It's a privacy that is still legally and culturally protected.
I will not read the mail of my neighbor.
I mean, I read James Seligman's letters, but he was gone a long time.
I won't read my husband's mail. I don't read other people's mail.
We are prohibited by law from reading other people's mail.
And because of that privacy,
that has been recognized for thousands of year -
Cicero talked about the privacy of letters because of that privacy.
What we are able to share in our letters can be very intimate?
It can be very private; it can be very important.
And it is also something that is singular and unique.
A letter is written for one person, from one person,
to share one special moment or a series of thoughts
in one person's life with another person.
I went really way far back to Cicero and earlier in researching letters.
I looked at the letters of ancient Egyptians.
Egyptians wrote thousands of letters,
which is amazing because about 90% of Egyptians could not read or write.
So, only about 10% could.
So how did they write these thousands of letters?
They would go to their local scribe and ask him to write a letter for them.
The best job to have in ancient Egypt was to be the local scribe.
You always had work.
People were always knocking on your door.
And of all the thousands of letters that we do have,
there are thousands more that we don't,
because the letters written on papyrus are for the most part gone.
What we do have are the letters written on pottery shards.
The ancient Egyptians were very thrifty,
so if a pot broke, they would save those pieces,
and they would use those pieces to write out a message -
or have a scribe write out a message - and they would send the message off.
And in almost every Egyptian letter, you see the phrase,
"It is good if the Lord takes note."
What this means is that I went through all this trouble to write you a letter -
I hired the scribe, I got this piece of pottery,
I went through all this trouble -
you should pay attention to what I've done.
You should pay attention to this letter
because of the care, and thought, and time that's gone into it.
The ancient Egyptians did not only write to the living.
They wrote to the dead.
They sent a lot of letters to their dearly departed.
And these were sort of guilt-trip letters.
Basically, "I did so much for you when you were alive,
you can't send a little luck my way?"
And they would expect that having written to the dead,
their favors would be granted.
They just assumed all that trouble was taken, all that care was taken,
of course, somebody's going to grant my favor - I wrote them a letter.
Of all the letters that I've looked at -
and I've looked at thousands over the past years -
the emotion that I see most often expressed is not love,
it's not anger or debate, it's thanks.
Thanks.
Almost every letter has some expression of thanks.
And some letters are all about thanks.
Thanks for being there when I needed you.
Thanks for the cookies.
Thanks for being my mom.
And thanks are best expressed in a letter, because of the care, again, and the time -
we don't have to go to a local scribe -
but we do have to sit down,
find a piece of paper, compose our thoughts, write legibly,
find an envelope, find a stamp.
It takes time to write a letter.
And in taking that time, we show just how much we do care.
And how grateful we are.
And how thankful we are.
That same care and thought is why we write condolence letters.
When someone dies,
someone close to someone we know,
we want to let that someone we know
understand that we know what they're going through -
they're very sad.
And we have a memory of the person that's gone,
and we are going to remember that person.
We'll write something that we remember as special about that person who's gone.
And by writing it, we're kind of saying, "Look, we'll remember.
They may be gone, but they are going to live on
because we'll all remember them.
And they are in this letter."
When Abraham Lincoln was president, he had to write many condolence letters.
He wrote to many of the parents of the Union soldiers
who died in the Civil War.
When his own son Willy died in 1862, of typhus,
a flood of condolence letters came into the White House.
Now, these letters are moving and they're heartbreaking.
They're moving because across party lines,
across divisions,
people who didn't agree with Lincoln on anything
wrote him letters saying, "I am so sorry for your loss.
I am so sorry you had to go through this."
And the letters are heartbreaking
because almost every letter tells the story of,
"I know what you're going through.
I lost my son" or, "I lost my daughter."
This was the 1800s and kids didn't have a great chance of surviving.
And so these letters all shared with Lincoln,
saying, "I know what you are going through, I feel for you.
Let me take some of that burden."
The letter was a bridge, an extension,
saying, "I can take some of that burden, I can help you."
It offered Lincoln a consolation in his really terrible sorrow.
Now, there are many other aspects of letter writing
that I could go on and on about, but my time has come to end.
So, what I want to say
is I want everyone here
to experience the passion I have for letters;
to go home tonight, to sit down and find a piece a paper
and write a letter to someone you love
or someone you think needs a happy note in the mail.
Then I want you to put it in an envelope.
And for you younger people - the stamp goes on the upper right corner.
(Laughter)
And then you go out to the mailbox and mail that letter.
I think that the Westport branch of the U. S. Postal Service
will be like, "Oh my gosh, look at all these letters.
We're not dead yet, letters aren't dead yet."
And you know what? Letters are not dead yet.
Letters are alive because we are alive.
And most of us will not make it into the history books.
But by writing letters, we can create history.
We can keep ourselves alive.
So, please join in my passion and write a letter tonight.
Thank you.
(Applause)