Love Makes Life Beautiful!!

Once, while thumbing through my favorite book --To the Lighthouseby Virginia Woolf -- I found a scrap of paper wedged within the "Time Passes" section. "Hey," it read, "you found me! I love you."

The scrawl (sloppy, Sharpie-thick) was my ex-boyfriend's. Things had ended on not-great terms, resulting in a purging of all goofy or heartfelt e-mail exchanges (hundreds), but I decided to hang on to the note; it was a very tangible remnant of something elusive. It probably took him less then a minute to write, and, knowing him, the action left his mind as soon as he'd completed it -- quite literally "written off." Why, then, did I value it more than nearly novel-length debates aboutJohn Locke's optimism versus Jack Shepherd's cool rationality?

The answer could lie in the fact that I've always been Team Locke (see: blind romanticism), but I like to think that there's more to it than that. There's something universally appealing about hand-written letters. Simone de Beauvoir touches on their importance in "The Age of Discretion," in which the narrator complains about having to talk with her husband on the phone: "You are not together as you are in conversation, for you do not see one another. You are not alone as you are in front of a piece of paper that allows you to talk inwardly while you are addressing the other -- to seek out and find the truth."