Five Slices #25: A letter about letters

You've got mail

Bangalore
16 April 2025

From: Me
To: You

I used to write letters as a kid. Mostly to my grandfather. He passed away around the time I got my first smartphone, and I don't think I've handwritten one since. But letters are great. They let me express myself in a way that fragmented chats just can't. And considering that this is a news-letter, why don’t I just make it a letter about letters, addressed to you? (Read till the end… Or at least scroll if you get impatient)

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The dead letter detective

In the book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, there’s a planet where all lost ball-point pens go. I don’t know if any such planet exists. But here on earth, something similar happens to letters. Sometimes, letters can’t reach the address on the envelope and they get orphaned. There’s a place where these lost messages go to die – the dead letter office. Almost every country has one. The one in America has been operating since 1877 and in 2006 alone, approximately 90 million letters ended up there.

What happens next is part routine and part detective novel. Undeliverable letters, called “nixies” are sorted and then passed to clerks who deals with these anomalies. One of them, Patti Lyle Collins was considered the queen of the dead letter office, handling 1000 letters a day.

Another clerk named Tom Doherty did this job for more than 29 years. Each nixie was a personal challenge to him. Sometimes pranksters wrote cryptic, unsolvable addresses to see if Tom could crack the code and forward them to the right address. Sometimes love hung in the balance – A guy from France sent a postcard with only a girl’s name and phone number, with no address. Delving through a bookcase full of telephone directories, Tom found the girl’s address and forwarded the postcard to her.

The most extreme case? A letter that had the name of a Polish man with the address “Massachusetts.” No name, no street. Just a photograph on the back, of a man standing in front of a house with the number 232. Tom scanned the Boston street directory and found a man with that name on 232 West Fourth Street. He forwarded the letter there. Since it was never returned, he thinks it probably got there.

But these cases are one in a thousand. Most dead letters never find a home. Sometimes, they’re opened. Occasionally, they are auctioned to collectors. Mostly, they are just destroyed. Imagine a letter where you say everything, and it just disappears. That’s the ache of the unread.

The modern version of the dead letter office is a subreddit called Unsent Letters, where people post all the letters they didn't have courage to send. Scroll through if you want to feel the pain, or maybe the relief of not being alone in it.

Sources: Dead letters that computers can’t sort, the queen of dead letters, Tom Doherty’s adventures

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The 2000 year old letter

I told you a while ago about the eruption of the volcano Mount Vesuvius and how it buried the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. We know about that day not from archaeology – but from a letter. A Roman official named Pliny the Younger wrote to his historian friend Tacitus, describing what he saw:

It was not clear at that distance from which mountain the cloud was rising (it was afterwards known to be Vesuvius; its general appearance can best be expressed as being like a pine-tree, for it rose to a great height on a sort of trunk and then split off into branches, I imagine because it was thrust upwards by the first blast and then left unsupported as the pressure subsided, or else it was borne down by its own weight so that it spread out and gradually dispersed. Sometimes it looked white, sometimes blotched and dirty, according to the amount of soil and ashes it carried with it.

The letter was written in 79 AD, and somehow, 2000 years later, we’re still able to read it. How? First, Pliny never wrote the letter as private correspondence – it was half-performance. He curated nine books of letters to friends and public figures. He hoped to publish it and even mentioned in volume 1: “I hope that these letters will not be unworthy of being read.”

His scribes made copies of these books, and those copies spread. Later, Christian monks in Italy, France, and Switzerland found value in his Latin style and moral instruction, and transcribed the letters again. In the 8th and 9th centuries, Charlemagne’s educational reforms triggered a mini-renaissance of learning and replication. Later, Renaissance humanists like Petrarch and Poggio Bracciolini hunted down lost manuscripts, and revived Pliny. The printing press did the rest.

It’s staggering. One man’s letter survived fires, war, and centuries of change, when entire libraries were lost in the same period. His letters lasted because people wanted to read them. If you write something good enough to preserve, it lives on.

Also read: The world's oldest customer complaint letter, which is quite emo for someone from 1750 BC.

Sources: Pliny’s account of Vesuvius’ Explosion

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The post-box of Europe

Letters were the Internet of the medieval era. If you were a scientist or a thinker looking to share your ideas with the world, you didn’t have Twitter or Substack. You needed to know someone who could pass it along. Marin Mersenne was one of those people. They called him the “Post-box of Europe.” He was a laborer’s son who became a Christian monk, taught himself science and math, and sent thousands of letters connecting thinkers who might never have exchanged ideas otherwise.

Take Rene Descartes, for example – the man behind "I think, therefore I am". Mersenne introduced Descartes’ work to the world. After Mersenne died, they found 146 letters from Descartes to him. 146, imagine that. Mersenne also connected Blaise Pascal and Pierre Fermat, setting the foundation for probability theory. He provoked debates between Thomas Hobbes and Descartes. And he popularized the works of Torricelli (the barometer guy), Huygens (the optics guy), and Galileo (the guy).

When Galileo was placed under house arrest for defying the church with his scientific claims, his letters still reached Mersenne, who supported him by publishing his ideas. Otherwise we might have never heard of Galileo. Small world networks and social media thrive today because there are “honest brokers” like Mersenne who don’t seek fame but build bridges quietly. Mersenne wasn’t just a letter-writer. He was a mathematician himself and did some work on music theory. But his biggest contribution was the invisible architecture he built to let people's ideas flow.

Sources: This is everything you need to know about Mersenne.

visakan veerasamy

wrote a cool thread about “honest brokers” who connect people and collect favors.

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“You are not nameless”

Richard Feynman won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 for his work on quantum electrodynamics. He wasn’t just brilliant — he was a showman, a safe-cracking prankster, and one of the most recognizable scientists of his time. He worked with Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project (yes, he was in Nolan’s movie), investigated the Challenger space shuttle disaster, and gave a lecture that might have launched nanotechnology. He did all this while also playing bongo drums in forests, sketching women in bars, and taking mental math bets against abacus salesmen.

But Feynman’s favorite identity may have been as a teacher. His lectures are as accessible and fun as they are insightful. One day, an old student of Feynman, Koichi Mano, wrote to congratulate him. But the letter had a hint of self-pity in it. Mano called himself a “nameless man” working on a “humble and down-to-earth problem.”

Feynman was disappointed. He wrote a letter replying to Mano, gently explaining to him that it’s not about picking a great problem, but about finding one that you find interesting and useful. He even admitted:

“I made a mistake, I gave you the problem instead of letting you find your own; and left you with a wrong idea of what is interesting or pleasant or important to work on.”

The whole letter is interesting to read, but the ending stayed with me:

No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it. You say you are a nameless man. You are not to your wife and to your child. You will not long remain so to your immediate colleagues if you can answer their simple questions when they come into your office. You are not nameless to me. Do not remain nameless to yourself – it is too sad a way to be. Know your place in the world and evaluate yourself fairly, not in terms of your naïve ideals of your own youth, nor in terms of what you erroneously imagine your teacher’s ideals are.

Nothing is trivial. Like in Schindler's list, “Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.”

Links: This is Feynman’s letter to his student, these are his sketches of women in bars, and there are more stories of him being playful in the book “Surely you’re joking Mr. Feynman.” Feynman played pranks on his buddies even while working on the Manhattan project. This letter that he wrote to his wife is also really moving and if you have some time, check it out.

Oh also, my friend

Adiatelic

is the one who told me about Feynman’s letter. He writes fun articles about science on his blog, and you should totally subscribe to him.

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Kafka’s letter to his father

Franz Kafka’s bizarre stories are like no one else’s. In Metamorphosis, the main character wakes up one morning and finds that he’s become a giant cockroach (okay, he just says insect, but I always imagine a cockroach because it’s way more disgusting). The rest of the book is the (somewhat depressing) story of what happens next. In The Trial, the hero is arrested and prosecuted – but he never learns what crime he’s accused of. His worlds are surreal and strange.

Kafka is one of my favorite writers.
But he's also one of the people I’d least want to become.

The man had a job but he was unhappy with it, he was handsome and smart but tormented by the belief that people found him physically and mentally repulsive, and created genius stories but was so doubtful of his own writing that he didn't publish most of what he wrote. He burned 90% of his works. Much of the remainder was lost as well. He even requested his friend Max Brod to destroy everything else after his death. But (luckily? unluckily?) Brod ignored his request – which is why we know about Kafka today. I can only imagine what the missing work was like.

Kafka also wrote letters. A lot of them. His letters to Milena, his fiancée whom he never married, were compiled into a book. Kafka also wrote a painfully intense letter to his father, 45 pages long. Reading it is like watching a family argue at a bus-stop while waiting for your ride: uncomfortable, but impossible to look away. It starts like this:

This is the full letter. (Handle with care)

Kafka had a difficult relationship with his dad, and the letter was his final attempt to explain himself. He gave the letter to his mother to deliver. She quietly returned it because she didn’t want trouble. But now 106 years after he wrote it, the entire world can read the personal tirade of a man who wanted all of his writing to be destroyed. Kafka must be rolling in his grave.

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A couple more things you might like to read

• Kafka admired the philosopher Kierkegaard, another writer of haunting existentialism. Kierkegaard also wrote letters to his fiancee, and also never married her. I discovered their strange mirror-image story through a note by

  Maria Rustica
  . This is their story:

• Henry Matisse’s beautiful handwritten notes that I’d have loved to get in the mail:

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You know what’s great about this letter? You don’t need to keep it a secret. You can forward it to your friends, you can share it with your boss, you can show it to your dog. And if they like it, I’ll write letters to them too. All they need to do is:

Anyway, hope this letter made you smile. See ya.

Yours,
Adhithya