汉娜布伦雪尔：给陌生人的情信

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汉娜布伦雪尔：给陌生人的情信
Hannah Brencher: Love letters to strangers

汉娜布伦雪尔的妈妈常给她写信。大学毕业后，她感到心情跌到谷底的时候，她做了自己感觉很自然的事--给陌生人写情信并留待他们发现。这个行动后来成了一项全球活动，世界需要更多情信（The World Needs More Love Letters），将手写信送到需要的人怀中。

Hannah Brencher believes in the power of pen and paper, and has started a globalinitiative that encourages strangers to exchange love letters.

Why you should listen to her：

Hannah Brechner has always loved that her family communicates via handwritten letters. In October of 2010, she began writing love letters intended for strangers and tucking them away in libraries and cafes across New York City, for people to randomly discover. Soon, she offered on her blog HannahKaty.com to write a letter to anyone who needed one. Over the next year, she mailed out more than 400 hand-penned letters. Today she runs The World Needs More Love Letters, a letter exchange dedicated to connecting strangers across the globe through the art of letter writing.

In addition, Brencher works as a copywriter and creative consultant, helping brands inject human touches into their communications plans.

I was one of the only kids in college who had a reason to go to the P.O. box at the end of the day, and that was mainly because my mother has never believed in email, in Facebook, in texting or cell phones in general. And so while other kids were BBM-ing their parents, I was literally waiting by the mailbox to get a letter from home to see how the weekend had gone, which was a little frustrating when Grandma was in the hospital, but I was just looking for some sort of scribble, some unkempt cursive from my mother.

And so when I moved to New York City after college and got completely sucker-punched in the face by depression, I did the only thing I could think of at the time. I wrote those same kinds of letters that my mother had written me for strangers, and tucked them all throughout the city, dozens and dozens of them. I left them everywhere, in cafes and in libraries, at the U.N., everywhere. I blogged about those letters and the days when they were necessary, and I posed a kind of crazy promise to the Internet: that if you asked me for a hand-written letter, I would write you one, no questions asked. Overnight, my inbox morphed into this harbor of heartbreak -- a single mother in Sacramento, a girl being bullied in rural Kansas, all asking me, a 22-year-old girl who barely even knew her own coffee order, to write them a love letter and give them a reason to wait by the mailbox.

Well, today I fuel a global organization that is fueled by those trips to the mailbox, fueled by the ways in which we can harness social media like never before to write and mail strangers letters when they need them most, but most of all, fueled by crates of mail like this one, my trusty mail crate, filled with the scriptings of ordinary people, strangers writing letters to other strangers not because they're ever going to meet and laugh over a cup of coffee, but because they have found one another by way of letter-writing.

But, you know, the thing that always gets me about these letters is that most of them have been written by people that have never known themselves loved on a piece of paper. They could not tell you about the ink of their own love letters. They're the ones from my generation, the ones of us that have grown up into a world where everything is paperless, and where some of our best conversations have happened upon a screen. We have learned to diary our pain onto Facebook, and we speak swiftly in 140 characters or less.

But what if it's not about efficiency this time? I was on the subway yesterday with this mail crate, which is a conversation starter, let me tell you. If you ever need one, just carry one of these. (Laughter) And a man just stared at me, and he was like, "Well, why don't you use the Internet?" And I thought, "Well, sir, I am not a strategist, nor am I specialist. I am merely a storyteller." And so I could tell you about a woman whose husband has just come home from Afghanistan, and she is having a hard time unearthing this thing called conversation, and so she tucks love letters throughout the house as a way to say, "Come back to me. Find me when you can." Or a girl who decides that she is going to leave love letters around her campus in Dubuque, Iowa, only to find her efforts ripple-effected the next day when she walks out onto the quad and finds love letters hanging from the trees, tucked in the bushes and the benches. Or the man who decides that he is going to take his life, uses Facebook as a way to say goodbye to friends and family. Well, tonight he sleeps safely with a stack of letters just like this one tucked beneath his pillow, scripted by strangers who were there for him when.

These are the kinds of stories that convinced me that letter-writing will never again need to flip back her hair and talk about efficiency, because she is an art form now, all the parts of her, the signing, the scripting, the mailing, the doodles in the margins. The mere fact that somebody would even just sit down, pull out a piece of paper and think about someone the whole way through, with an intention that is so much harder to unearth when the browser is up and the iPhone is pinging and we've got six conversations rolling in at once, that is an art form that does not fall down to the Goliath of "get faster," no matter how many social networks we might join. We still clutch close these letters to our chest, to the words that speak louder than loud, when we turn pages into palettes to say the things that we have needed to say, the words that we have needed to write, to sisters and brothers and even to strangers, for far too long. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)

上大学时，我是唯一一个需要 在一天结束的时候去开邮箱的人， 主要是因为我妈妈从不信赖 电子邮件、社交网站、短信，甚至电话。 于是，别人在和父母转短信的时候 我却等在邮箱旁边 等待家书，了解家人怎么度过周末的， 这在祖母住院的期间真让我有些抓狂， 我只能通过母亲手写的 有点潦草的只言片语来了解情况。

所以在我大学毕业后，来到了纽约， 当时正经历人生的低谷，无法自拔， 我做了唯一能想到的一件事。 就像妈妈给我手写家书一样 我也给遍布全城的陌生人写信。 十多封十多封地写，我把它们留在城市的各个角落， 咖啡馆、图书馆，甚至联合国总部，到处都有。 我也在博客中提过这些信件， 有时出于需要，我也会 在博客上作疯狂的保证： 如果你想我给你亲手写封信， 我会给你写一封，不问任何问题。 一夜之间，我的邮箱成了寄托心碎故事的港湾--- 住在萨克拉门托（美国加州首府）的单身妈妈、来自堪萨斯乡下的 被欺负的女孩，都来问我这么一个22岁的 她们素未谋面，连点咖啡时都犹豫不决的女生， 给她们写一封情书， 好让她们也有个理由守候在邮箱旁。

今天我推行着一个国际组织， 通过这些发往邮箱的信件， 通过这样的方式我们放慢新兴社交媒体的脚步， 在陌生人最需要的时候， 给他们写信寄信，但最重要的是 通过这些邮箱，像我的这个可靠邮箱， 里面装满普通人的字迹， 给素未谋面的陌生人写信不是因为 他们会见面，一起喝咖啡聊聊天， 而是因为通过写信而找到彼此。

你们知道吗，这些信件最常让我触动的地方是 大多数的信件都是由 这些从来不知道情书为何物的人写来的。 他们压根不知道什么是手写情书。 他们是我这一代的人， 在我们这一代成长的世界， 一切都是无纸化的， 而我们一些最好的对话都发生在屏幕里。 我们学会把伤心事记录在社交网站Facebook上， 我们的话精简在140个字符或以内。

但如果说写信无关效率呢？ 我昨天提着这个邮箱坐地铁， 我跟你们说，它真是个搭讪利器。 如果你想和别人搭讪，你就带一个邮箱在身边。（笑声） 有个男人看着我，像是说， “你怎么不用网络呢？” 我想，“先生，我不是军事家， 我也不是专家。我只是个说故事的人。” 我可以告诉你们一个女人的故事， 她的丈夫刚从阿富汗归来， 她不知道该如何开展对话， 所以她就把这些情书藏到屋子的各个角落， 作为一种方式，说“回到我身边。 随时来找我谈谈吧。” 或是一个女孩的故事，她决定把情信 放在她所在位于爱荷华州迪比克的校园各处， 第二天发现她的心思引起了涟漪效应 她走进广场的时候发现树上挂有情信 灌木丛中，长凳上也塞有情信。 还有一个男子，他决定结束生命， 他在Facebook上面告别 亲朋好友。 而今他安然睡在一堆信件上面 就像说这样一封信塞在他的枕头下面， 这些信是陌生人写的，他们在他最需要的时候支持他。

这些故事让我相信 这些手写信件永远都不需要挠首弄姿 讲究时效，因为她现在就是一种艺术形式， 她所有的一切，署名，手写体，邮寄， 页边的涂画都是艺术。 事实上仅仅是有人会真的坐下来， 摊开一张纸，花一天时间想念一个人， 注意力是如此的集中 甚至不知道浏览器开了，苹果手机在响， 有六个对话框在同时滚动， 就说明写信是一种艺术形式， 不管我们加入了多少社交网络， 写信不会是一种“更快速”的方式。 我们依然会把这些信紧握胸前， 大声说出想说的话， 在信纸上尽情抒发 我们需要说的话， 写出我们需要写的文字，给姐妹们， 兄弟们，甚至陌生人们，抒写情怀。 谢谢。（掌声） （掌声）