Shredding the Past: Letters, Memory, and Other Dangerous Activities

In the film Metropolitan, there’s an exchange that has always struck me as both funny and devastating. Tom Townsend, earnest and slightly wounded, asks his high school love interest, Serena Slocum about their correspondence:

Tom: “You threw away all the letters I wrote you?”

Serena: “I throw away nearly everything. I don’t want to go through the rest of my life with the mail I got when I was sixteen.”

Tom: “I’m surprised. Someone goes through the trouble of writing a real letter—I save it. People don’t write many personal letters anymore.”

Tom, the archivist; Serena, the minimalist; and the rest of us floating somewhere between keeping just enough paper to feel sentimental, but not enough to require zoning permits for storage.

I thought of that scene while sitting beside the shredder in our basement office that sounded increasingly triumphant with each page it devoured. I had decided whether bravely or foolishly, to unclutter decades of correspondence in what I had proudly collected to form a personal archive. I rarely reread these letters, and their contents would mean nothing to anyone else. Now in my mid-sixties, I’m pausing to take stock of life and walk around the house and imagine after I am gone, what would be the point of leaving behind decades of personal letters. I wondered, for example, how my adult daughter would puzzle out who these people were, and what they were writing about. Still, I felt small pangs of guilt, as though shredding them was a small act of self-erasure. Letters, after all, are the closest thing to a card catalogue of our private autobiography.

I had been a prolific letter writer from my teens into my mid-twenties with dozens of correspondents starting with my cousins and later summer friends, girlfriends, room mates, and work friends. These letters had been my proof that certain friendships, crushes, arguments, and ambitions actually happened. Without the physical artifact, was I really that person who received a four-page rant about a dorm prank? Were we ever that delighted by jokes about an obscure comic book promoting a fake cult?

Turns out: yes, we were.

And maybe that’s the danger for those that have to figure it out after we’re gone.

The Problem of Saving Things (or Why Humans Behave Like Sentimental Squirrels)

Humans have been writing letters for roughly as long as we’ve been losing them. The ancient Egyptians wrote on papyrus; the Romans complained that their papyrus shipments were late; medieval monks copied letters carefully, only for half the scrolls to be used later as shoe liners. Plato was critical of writing saying it would make our memories lazy. 

But the impulse behind letters is universal: the desire to anchor memory in something sturdier than the mind, which is prone to wandering off unsupervised.

So yes, I wrote down the first names and last name initials of correspondents before shredding their letters—as though this would somehow outwit entropy. But even now I know future-me will stare at the list one day and say, “Greg? Which Greg?”

The Twilight Zone Problem of Nostalgia

There’s a Twilight Zone episode, “Walking Distance” in which Martin Sloan (Gig Young), a stressed out executive finds refuge in the nostalgia of returning to his hometown, Homewood, as it was when he was a boy, complete with his younger self. But he soon learns the impossibility of reliving the past, as his father tells him he doesn’t belong there. 

My old letters carried a similar pull of nostalgia. They lured me back to earlier selves that were sometimes charming, sometimes insufferable, and to people who might not be thrilled to hear from a ghost of their 20-year-old past. Nostalgia is wonderful in theory, but in practice it tends to show up wearing dated clothing

As I sorted letters, I wondered what became of everyone I once corresponded with. The curiosity was intense, like finding missing pieces to a jigsaw puzzle. The more details from the letters, the more detailed the memory. 

A few times, I was curious about finding the person on social media, the digital equivalent of knocking on their front door and saying, “Surprise! We were friends in 1981!”

I could imagine responses would likely vary:

• “So great to hear from you!”
  
  

• “Um… who is this?”
  
  

• “Why did you keep my letters for 40 years? Should I be afraid?”
  
  

Many of the letters contained humor that did not travel well across time—jokes about professors or TV shows, slang that should have caused an embarrassing moment at a future Senate confirmation hearing, or dramatic confidences written with the full seriousness only teenagers possess. Some letters were from people I no longer remembered at all. The shredder, at those moments, seemed almost merciful. It’s ok to visit the past, just don’t hang around too long or, like Martin Sloan,  you’ll be asked to leave. 

The Monumental Act of Letting Go

For someone who ranks high on both the Romantic Scale and the Nostalgia Index, shredding these letters would normally have been unthinkable. I once kept all my college notebooks because I wanted proof of my four years of education showing through careful handwriting notes I’d actually taken a Philosophy class in Logic or the History of Cinema.

A friend of mine, after his divorce, burned, one at a time, every letter his ex-wife ever wrote him. It was cathartic, he said. I admired the decisiveness. My shredding was quieter, but no less symbolic. With each sheet, I felt both lighter and older—an odd combination that only nostalgia can produce.

The thing about letters is decades after receiving them, they might have more meaning to the sender, like a diary entry reminding them of what they were doing at that time. I may be less interested in what classes the person was taking or what trips they had taken but it could trigger a pleasant memory for the sender.  Even so, if you reached back to offer them these letters, it would likely be profoundly weird or rude, like mailing someone a time capsule they didn’t know they created.  

Then I wonder about all the letters I sent to those people over the years. Did they archive them in a shoebox somewhere like me or did they read them and throw them away, or did they ever go back and reread them. It’s possible there are a few that are still out there like pieces of your life spread across the country. And I wonder whether their recipients are considering a similar house-cleaning. 

In the end, I kept a few. Not many. Enough to remind me that I existed in earlier drafts, that friendships mattered, that life was once written in longhand.

What Remains After the Paper Is Gone

Memory, to me, is a traveler moving from destination to destination like grandmother’s house at Christmas, a night decorating the homecoming float in high school, early adulthood, but the more memory travels those roads among destinations, it seems to get roughed up by Time and its sidekick, Forgetting. Destroying those letters is like deleting a geolocation app (formerly road maps) that can aid you in driving your route. Now, when memory navigates to its next destination, like my 45th high school reunion, it might remember a face but it loses the name.

The letters are gone. The memories will live on unaided, distorted, incomplete, fond, and occasionally embarrassing. And as Tom Townsend might say, even if people don’t write many personal letters anymore, the ones we once received were enough.

END