
Whenever I'm feeling particularly giddy-in-love, or as is more generally the case, desperately lovelorn, I find a lot of solace in poetry and novels about love.
Today, while browsing about the Falmouth Public Library instead of working on my radio project, I found a new outlet: collections of love letters.
Before I knew it, I'd piled up an enormous stack, and managed only to put one down. So for the remainder of this drizzly, and, as Robin says, "blustery", day, I've been holed up in my cozy room reading love letters, written by everyone from Henry IV and Kafka to Simone de Beauvoir and John Keats.
Turns out, I'm not the only crazy person, and most people find themselves suffering through just the same level of obsession. That, or they're just really good at B.S.
I especially like this one by Kafka to Felice Bauer, with all of its defiance and sarcasm:
October 31st, 1912.
When at last a letter arrives -- after the door to my room has opened a thousand times to admit, not the man with the letter, but innumerable people whose calm expressions torment me because they feel themselves to be in the right place, whereas only the man with the letter, and no one else, has the right to appear -- when at last the letter arrives, then I think for a while I can be calm, that I shall be satisfied by it and that the day will go well. But then I have read it, there is more in it than I might ever have expected to learn . . . I read the letter once, put it aside, and read it again; I pick up a file but am really only reading your letter; I am with the typist, to whom I am supposed to dictate, and again your letter slowly slides through my fingers and I have begun to draw it out of my pocket when people ask me something and I know perfectly well I should not be thinking of your letter now, yet that thought is all that occurs to me -- but after all that I am as hungry as before, as restless as before, and once again the door starts swinging merrily, as though the man with the letter were about to appear again. That is what you call the 'little pleasure' your letters give me.
In another letter, Franz repeats his one-track train of thought:
But then I simply cannot do without your letters. I am obsessed by the need for news of you. It is only through your letters that I become capable of even the most insignificant daily task. I need your letter to move my little finger properly.
(photo taken of a Smith College student in the forties)
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