The Loneliness of Fulfillment

I felt satisfied.
It was an unfamiliar
and unsatisfying sensation.
I wanted it to end.
And it soon did.

John Tottenham

Thirsty Boots

Dearest,

I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that – everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer.

I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.




Woolf Suicide Letter

Sunday after the War

Miller

Heaven

Burguete, Navera.
July 1 [1925] –

Dear Scott –

We are going in to Pamplona tomorrow. Been trout fishing here. How are you? And how is Zelda?

I am feeling better than I’ve ever felt — haven’t drunk any thing but wine since I left Paris. God it has been wonderful country. But you hate country. All right omit description of country. I wonder what your idea of heaven would be — A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists. All powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death. And hell would probably an ugly vacuum full of poor polygamists unable to obtain booze or with chronic stomach disorders that they called secret sorrows.

To me a heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in and two lovely houses in the town; one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them truly and well and the other where I would have my nine beautiful mistresses on 9 different floors and one house would be fitted up with special copies of the Dial printed on soft tissue and kept in the toilets on every floor and in the other house we would use the American Mercury and the New Republic. Then there would be a fine church like in Pamplona where I could go and be confessed on the way from one house to the other and I would get on my horse and ride out with my son to my bull ranch named Hacienda Hadley and toss coins to all my illegitimate children that lined the road. I would write out at the Hacienda and send my son in to lock the chastity belts onto my mistresses because someone had just galloped up with the news that a notorious monogamist named Fitzgerald had been seen riding toward the town at the head of a company of strolling drinkers.

Well anyway were going into town tomorrow early in the morning. Write me at the / Hotel Quintana
Pamplona
Spain

Or don’t you like to write letters*. I do because it’s such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you’ve done something.

So long and love to Zelda from us both –

Yours,
Ernest

Love Letter Written in a Burning Building

I am in a crate, the crate that was ours,

full of white shirts and salad greens,

the icebox knocking at our delectable knocks,

and I wore movies in my eyes,

and you wore eggs in your tunnel,

and we played sheets, sheets, sheets

all day, even in the bathtub like lunatics.

But today I set the bed afire

and smoke is filling the room,

it is getting hot enough for the walls to melt,

and the icebox, a gluey white tooth.

I have on a mask in order to write my last words,

and they are just for you, and I will place them

in the icebox saved for vodka and tomatoes,

and perhaps they will last.

The dog will not. Her spots will fall off.

The old letters will melt into a black bee.

The night gowns are already shredding

into paper, the yellow, the red, the purple.

The bed – well, the sheets have turned to gold -

hard, hard gold, and the mattress

is being kissed into a stone.

As for me, my dearest Foxxy,

my poems to you may or may not reach the icebox

and its hopeful eternity,

for isn’t yours enough?

The one where you name

my name right out in P.R.?

If my toes weren’t yielding to pitch

I’d tell the whole story -

not just the sheet story

but the belly-button story,

the pried-eyelid story,

the whiskey-sour-of-the-nipple story -

and shovel back our love where it belonged.

Despite my asbestos gloves,

the cough is filling me with black and a red powder seeps through my

veins,

our little crate goes down so publicly

and without meaning it, you see, meaning a solo act,

a cremation of the love,

but instead we seem to be going down right in the middle of a Russian

street,

the flames making the sound of

the horse being beaten and beaten,

the whip is adoring its human triumph

while the flies wait, blow by blow,

straight from United Fruit, Inc.

Anne Sexton

Wilde

[...] we are together. He understands me and my art, and loves both. I hope never to be separated from him. He is a most delicate and exquisite poet, besides — far the finest of all the young poets in England. You have got to publish his next volume; it is full of lovely lyrics, flute-music and moon-music, and sonnets in ivory and gold. He is witty, graceful, lovely to look at, lovable to be with. He has also ruined my life, so I can’t help loving him — it is the only thing to do.

Oscar

La jauría

Y la fiesta se acaba,

y los cuentos de hadas que te ayudaban a dormir, 

los sueños de piel sin poros, 

las noches en medio de aquel santuario de lobos, 

la jauría de dos, 

huir al norte,

al norte de mi.

Por quién doblan las campanas

“Keep right on lying to me. That's what I want you to do.” — Ernest Hemingway

Witness to my Life

My dear little girl

For a long time I’ve been wanting to write to you in the evening after one of those outings with friends that I will soon be describing in “A Defeat,” the kind when the world is ours. I wanted to bring you my conqueror’s joy and lay it at your feet, as they did in the Age of the Sun King. And then, tired out by all the shouting, I always simply went to bed. Today I’m doing it to feel the pleasure you don’t yet know, of turning abruptly from friendship to love, from strength to tenderness. Tonight I love you in a way that you have not known in me: I am neither worn down by travels nor wrapped up in the desire for your presence. I am mastering my love for you and turning it inwards as a constituent element of myself. This happens much more often than I admit to you, but seldom when I’m writing to you. Try to understand me: I love you while paying attention to external things. At Toulouse I simply loved you. Tonight I love you on a spring evening. I love you with the window open. You are mine, and things are mine, and my love alters the things around me and the things around me alter my love.

My dear little girl, as I’ve told you, what you’re lacking is friendship. But now is the time for more practical advice. Couldn’t you find a woman friend? How can Toulouse fail to contain one intelligent young woman worthy of you*? But you wouldn’t have to love her. Alas, you’re always ready to give your love, it’s the easiest thing to get from you. I’m not talking about your love for me, which is well beyond that, but you are lavish with little secondary loves, like that night in Thiviers when you loved that peasant walking downhill in the dark, whistling away, who turned out to be me. Get to know the feeling, free of tenderness, that comes from being two. It’s hard, because all friendship, even between two red-blooded men, has its moments of love. I have only to console my grieving friend to love him; it’s a feeling easily weakened and distorted. But you’re capable of it, and you must experience it. And so, despite your fleeting misanthropy, have you imagined what a lovely adventure it would be to search Toulouse for a woman who would be worthy of you and whom you wouldn’t be in love with? Don’t bother with the physical side or the social situation. And search honestly. And if you find nothing, turn Henri Pons, whom you scarcely love anymore, into a friend.

[…]

I love you with all my heart and soul.

* De Beauvoir would come to have a number of young female lovers, whom she’d usually introduce to Sartre over the course of their relationship.

Fear and Trembling

“Because it is possible to create — creating one’s self, willing to be one’s self… — one has anxiety. One would have no anxiety if there were no possibility whatever.”

hapiness

this isn't

Jenny

She couldn't imagine me not in her life, but she had very clearly imagined herself not in mine.

-gjallard

Tu problema

Qué ya no escribes.

¿Sabes cual es tu problema? dice,
                        que dejaste de escribir historias.

Si a mi no me gusta escribir.

Lo que a mi me gusta es que me escriban.

A mi lo que me gusta es que me escribas.

Show me the place

Fatal or otherwise

Anne Sexton to her daughter

Dear Linda,

I am in the middle of a flight to St. Louis to give a reading. I was reading a New Yorker story that made me think of my mother and all alone in the seat I whispered to her “I know, Mother, I know.” (Found a pen!) And I thought of you — someday flying somewhere all alone and me dead perhaps and you wishing to speak to me.

And I want to speak back. (Linda, maybe it won’t be flying, maybe it will be at your own kitchen table drinking tea some afternoon when you are 40. Anytime.) — I want to say back.

1st I love you.

2. You never let me down.

3. I know. I was there once. I too, was 40 with a dead mother who I needed still. . . .

This is my message to the 40 year old Linda. No matter what happens you were always my bobolink, my special Linda Gray. Life is not easy. It is awfully lonely. I know that. Now you too know it — wherever you are, Linda, talking to me. But I’ve had a good life — I wrote unhappy — but I lived to the hilt. You too, Linda — Live to the HILT! To the top. I love you 40 year old, Linda, and I love what you do, what you find, what you are!—Be your own woman. Belong to those you love. Talk to my poems, and talk to your heart — I’m in both: if you need me. I lied, Linda. I did love my mother and she loved me. She never held me but I miss her, so that I have to deny I ever loved her — or she me! Silly Anne! So there!

XOXOXO
Mom

Reasons

I fight for the wrong reasons, 

because the right reasons won't let me fight for them.

A.

Old rags

Sísifo

,,
MY DEAR,

I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO TODAY, HELP ME DECIDE.

SHOULD I CUT MYSELF OPEN AND POUR MY HEART ON THESE PAGES? OR SHOULD I SIT HERE AND DO NOTHING, NOBODY’S ASKING ANYTHING OF ME AFTERALL.

SHOULD I JUMP OFF THE CLIFF THAT HAS MY HEART BEATING SO AND DEVELOP MY WINGS ON THE WAY DOWN? OR SHOULD I STEP BACK FROM THE EDGE, AND LET THE OTHERS DEAL WITH THIS THING CALLED COURAGE.

SHOULD I STARE BACK AT THE EXISTENTIAL ABYSS THAT HAUNTS ME SO AND TRY DESPERATELY TO GRAB FROM IT A SENSE OF SELF? OR SHOULD I KEEP WALKING HALF-ASLEEP, ONLY HALF-LOOKING AT IT EVERY NOW AND THEN IN TIMES IN WHICH I CAN’T HELP DOING ANYTHING BUT?

SHOULD I KILL MYSELF OR HAVE A CUP OF COFFEE?

FALSELY YOURS,


A. CAMUS

A Natural History of Love

We think of it as a sort of traffic accident of the heart. It is an emotion that scares us more than cruelty, more than violence, more than hatred. We allow ourselves to be foiled by the vagueness of the word. After all, love requires the utmost vulnerability. We equip someone with freshly sharpened knives; strip naked; then invite him to stand close. What could be scarier?

+Diane Ackerman