Return to sender?

I'm sorting letters. There are some 10.000 letters to and from Bergman in the archive, only about half of which have been catalogued yet. This will keep us busy for a while. (Deciphering scrawls, or tracking down the person who signed a letter 19 September 1982 with "Lars", does take a while.)

Usually, however, we're doing just fine. The letters are neatly sorted and catalogued, before they end up in archive boxes and eventually (if at all) someone asks to read them.

Anyway. If you look carefully at the letters above, you'll notice their postmarks are from July 2007. Ingmar Bergman died 30 July that year, and so the letters were never opened. I cannot bring myself to do it either.

'Even if prayer is just a cry into an empty space, we should not desist from that cry,' Bergman writes in his notebook 24 July 1964, almost exactly fortythree years earlier.