There are days when the feeling of being a relic of another age haunts my every step. Such as last night, while looking for a recipe for fried catfish, when I found a letter, tucked into the pages of a cookbook, from an old friend. Instead of preparing dinner, I caught up with the 2011 version of my friend in her small village in Norfolk, England.

I could have just as easily grabbed my copy of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting and read the tucked-away letter from my friend Phil (who lives in London) from 1996, in which he provided a translation of slang to help me understand the novel. Or the long letter from Uncle Al, now deceased, from January 1981, following my visit from Lake Charles to see him and his wife, my aunt, in Knoxville over Christmas 1980. Among the hundreds of books in my library reside dozens that hold the ephemera of my life.

This habit of longstanding, the placing of letters and postcards received into books selected at random, rewards me in ways that are increasingly hard to convey. It provides me with renewed emotional connections to people I know and love. This habit, shared by many, is the reason that out-of-print bookstore owners carefully leaf through the pages of books as they purchase: to find those records of life (and the occasional currency) that, in the sellers’ case, add value to the book.

It is also one of the reasons booksellers prefer the well-worn book to the newly printed title. Those old books are sanctified, bathed in the blood of time, and they share a permanent kinship with the former owner. Out of a biography of William Morris I once purchased fell an invoice dated July 23, 1926, from Mayhew Second-hand Booksellers on Charing Cross Road, London. That I had an invoice from that road, so well known among bibliophiles (84 Charing Cross Road), to a woman living in Knoxville, Tennessee, was a miraculous connection. I would like to have known her and why she ordered that title from that shop.

There is a cultural value to ephemera, whether it’s a postcard addressed to me or an invoice tucked away in a book or a bundle of letters nestled in a drawer. It connects us all. If not for the practitioners of writing letters and saving letters, I would not now have the correspondence of my father to his mother, written while he was stationed in the Pacific during World War 2. Or the letter of a great-great aunt to my great-grandmother complaining of getting fat from drinking beer in her old age (found in a book of my grandmother). By losing the ephemera, we lose the moments of serendipity that go with it.

The overall decline in literacy — the familiar drum I pound too often — will, no doubt, have its detrimental effect. But so too will the overall loss of curiosity about our past that this minor act of historical mining encourages. Why would we be interested in the letters of an aunt or uncle, found in a book, if we don’t read books in the first place? Write a letter when we care only about digital bytes of information, or simply reject the past in all of its parts in favor of the self-chosen family of the present? For the uninquisitive, the aliterate, the presentist, the past is opaque, perhaps never even occurred. The life of the email, the text, the tweet, the Instagram picture, all are ephemeral, each instantly deletable.

While this digital infatuation may be the enemy of future scholars, it is our collective loss as well. So, I leave you with this wish, that this Christmas season you experience the genuine pleasure of opening a book and having a letter fall into your lap, leaving you to spend a few minutes or an evening recalling a friend, a loved one, even a stranger, and for a moment in time step out of the present.

Thanks to my friend Richenda and her rediscovered letter for prompting these thoughts.