"Letter writing flourished before the days of the railroad because people who wrote to each other tended to live closer together and meet from time to time. What one can say to strangers or to those who have become strangers by distance is better printed than postmarked because it concerns everybody. The letters exchanged between Goethe and Schiller, or Flaubert and his mistress, drew much of their life from being bridges between interrupted conversations. Today the airplane has brought us closer together again but the telephone replaces writing and chatter replaces speech."

-Rudolf Arnheim: Parables of Sun Light: Observations on Psychology, The Arts, and the Rest