You might have heard this news item recently: In 1943 a Japanese soldier was at the front
in Burma when he wrote a postcard
to a friend in Nagasaki. The soldier died a year later but his
postcard continued on a long journey around the world, having been found by an
American soldier, and passed along through generations, eventually landing in
the hands of a Japanese exchange student.
The intended recipient is now 80 years old and said he was overwhelmed
to have this connection with his friend, 64 years later.
For commentator Peter Gilbert, stories of lost and
undelivered letters spark the imagination, and remind him of monumental works
in literature:
(GILBERT) For the great American novelist Herman Melville, there was something deeply moving, deeply poignant, about letters that don’t get delivered – human communication that goes awry. Both his masterpiece, Moby Dick, and his famous novella, Bartleby, the Scrivener, involve letters from loved ones that never reach their intended recipient. That profound human desire to connect with loved ones is frustrated and futile.
Melville seems to see post office mail sorters as especially alienated souls. In Moby Dick the narrator, Ishmael, writes that his goal of setting forth systematically everything about whales is such "a ponderous task [that – he says] no ordinary letter-sorter in the Post-office is equal to it. To grope down into the bottom of the sea after them," he writes , " . . . is a fearful thing."
Later, Ishmael explains that, "Every whale-ship takes out a goodly number of letters for various ships, whose delivery to the persons to whom they may be addressed, depends upon the mere chance of encountering them on the four oceans. Thus, most letters never reach their mark; and many are only received after attaining an age of two or three years or more."
Ishmael goes on to describe how his ship, The Pequod, received a letter from another vessel it happened to meet at sea: "[The envelope] was sorely tumbled, damp, and covered with a dull, spotted, green mould, in consequence of being kept in a dark locker of the cabin. Of such a letter, Death himself might well have been the post-boy."
The letter was from the wife of a sailor on The Pequod who had recently died.
"’Poor fellow! poor fellow! and from his wife,’ sighed one of the sailors."
We see the same theme in Melville’s story, Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street, written in 1853, two years after Moby Dick. That story should make us grateful for cards and letters delivered, for human connections successfully made. It tells about a successful Wall Street lawyer and the odd, alienated man he hires to copy legal documents. Increasingly, when Bartleby is asked to do something, he replies, "I would prefer not to."
After Bartleby’s death, the narrator hears a rumor about Bartleby’s past: apparently he’d been a clerk in the Dead Letter Office in Washington. The story ends with these poignant words:
"Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men? Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters and assorting them for the flames? For by the cart-load they are annually burned. Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring: the finger it was meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave; a bank-note sent in swiftest charity: he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. On errands of life, these letters speed to death.
"Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity! "
Note: Peter Gilbert is the executive director of the Vermont Humanities Council.