A few years ago a relative of mine, already in the last stretch of his life, collected all the letters that had been written in his house in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, sorted, scanned and bound them, and gave the volume to his sister as a gift. Since then, she often sits with the book in her lap, opens it and reads. "It's like remembering the family history, day by day," she says. And in her eyes there is a melancholy look.

Letters have become just that: a relic of the past, declared obsolete thanks to the internet, email, Facebook and Whatsapp. And yet, for a long time they were decisive for the life of Western societies. Religious orders, Renaissance humanists, Jewish intellectuals of the 19th and 20th centuries, built veritable networks of ink and paper, in which the consciousness and culture of an entire community unfolded. For absent relatives, for prisoners, for soldiers fighting in a remote place, for emigrants, there was a space emancipated from space, in which communication was possible. And people lived at the rhythm imposed by the letters. One waited for the next letter.

The critic Philippe Lejeune, specialized in the writings of the self, such as autobiography and the diary, has recently studied this genre of epistolary letters, from the most eminent to the most anonymous: letters would be the autobiographical and syncopated account of those who do not write. A way of keeping alive an ember. He has even analyzed the epistolaries of correspondents who have kept that ember alive for fifty years without having physically seen each other even once! And, of course, beyond the common people, literacy and the improvement in transportation led to the creation in the 18th century of a narrative sub-genre, the epistolary novel, which produced such eminent titles as Goethe's Werther or Les liaisons dangereuses de Laclos and which reached the 20th century, with examples such as Zweig's Letter from a stranger, Alice Walker's The Color Purple, or Delibes' Love Letters from a voluptuous sexagenarian.

Obviously, new technologies have changed this status, they have placed us in another way of living space and time. Advantages? Countless, such as immediacy and speed. Disadvantages? Those derived from the loss of something as precious as the learning of slowness: the letter forced us to put things in order, to take our time and, of course, to give grammar its due and construct complete sentences and paragraphs. Differences? Not so many. Pedro Salinas said in the first essay of El defensor, "Defensa de la carta misiva y de la correspondencia epistolar", that the letter was "a way of understanding each other without hearing each other, of looking at each other without being present". And such a thing - suffice it to recall here Rostand's Cyrano, who seduced Roxanne by means of letters signed by Christian - is not very far from the unreality that Facebook, Twitter, email, etc. allow. Fake profiles and feigned personalities were already part of the world of writing and, singularly, of epistolary writing. The main difference would be in the confusion of the new scripts with orality... and in the deficient prose to which this speed often gives rise.

I, like everyone else, have for years only receipt sent traffic fines and bank notices by letter. Only once in a while, it happens that a writer friend, addicted to pen and paper, sends me a book and encloses a letter between its pages. And I treasure it.