Life and death and life of a postcard – 06/21/2023 – Zeca Camargo

I have already boasted more than once in this space of being one of those who still send postcards. I know the pleasure my friends derive from receiving brief handwritten lines and an intriguing stamp. But my last trip made me rethink that experience.

This time I visited three countries that I had never been to before, bringing the number of stamps in my passport to 117. And, as usual, I sent postcards from each of these “new” places to a select list of friends.

Two of these collective postings –we’re talking about 25 postcards at least in each batch– were made in Europe and one in Africa. I already knew that I would return to Brazil before any of them reached their destination.

At best, the cards I sent from a destination very popular with tourists, and therefore with a fast mail service, would take at least three weeks traveling around the planet until they reached the addresses I marked with my scribbles. I miscalculated.

Of those who left Africa, still no sign. The ones from that very touristy place took a month to be delivered. The first to be sent, from eastern Europe, arrived even later: they started popping up on social media only a few days ago. And it was this detail that opened a reflection for me.

I knew these cards had arrived because I saw my friends posting pictures of them on Instagram. Unexpectedly, seeing the personal messages I had written to loved ones posted on a social network made me feel dizzy.

Of course, the issue here was not one of exposed privacy. I share with these recipients an intimacy so great that it makes it irrelevant. But that it was strange to see an item as prosaic as a postcard gain an infinite dimension in the digital world, that was. It was also a rebirth.

When I started traveling in the 1980s, postcards were still quite common. Back then, we spent hours choosing the “perfect” image to send specifically to someone, and the value of stamps was a budget item for the trip.

I knew the special feeling caused by the arrival of such a memory in a mailbox – not virtual, but real. In the reunions after arrival, they were the subject and then ended up in a souvenir box.

Over the decades, the tradition seemed to die: first email and then WhatsApp replaced with flying colors (and quickly!) the physical posts. But I, stubbornly, always insisted on sending the cards, to take a breath in the middle of the sea of ​​bills and direct mail that became almost the only deliveries from the post office.

I heard friends and girlfriends, during the great hiatus of the pandemic, lament that they missed them. Therefore, it was with pleasure that I resumed this activity now.

I wrote some in the courtyard of an orthodox Christian monastery from the 10th century. Others in a medieval city, today the setting for successful series. And a few more looking at hippos catching the last rays of sunlight on their backs before night falls.

And, in each of them I projected, perhaps with an exaggerated romanticism, the joy on the recipients’ faces when having that piece of paper in their hands. For everything to end in a handful of likes…

Which made me very happy! The friends who now post them, or even repost them, seem to close a modern cycle of this ritual, transforming, as the internet does so well, a small gesture into a huge showcase of affection and connection.

Which are exactly the two things that should be in your heart when you pick up a pen to write: “Greetings from…”.

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