Nakedly exposed.

In today’s NEW YORK TIMES … 6-6-15 …

MIKHAIL IOSSSEL, an author who left Leningrad in 1994, writes about how he used e-mail when he got here but still didn’t trust it… and why snail mail was better.

We all take our ‘snail mail’ for granted… as well as our emails… but Mikhail reminds us here that the written word is precious, and worthy of maintaining a stamped missive just for the intimacy.  And we don’t have guards who are reading our every thought.

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“After the Soviet Union fell, many people still assumed that every piece of cross-border mail was subject to perusal by the secret police.  By the mid90s, they knew this was no longer the case, but their survival instincts told them something different.  Even living in the United States, I couldn’t shake the feeling of being nakedly exposed by every sentence I released into the world.

And so, by unspoken mutual agreement, we kept up the old Soviet style of correspondence, confiding to paper our general feelings — … while avoiding any mention of the concrete circumstances of our lives.”

“It was easier for keep the sadness at bay with long, meticulously uninformative letters.  Snail mail stood for the safe vastness of the geographic distance between us.  Email erased that distance in a nanosecond, bringing out separate lives uncomfortably close together.”