I want to be the water that bathes you
A mixed mailbag
Nothing really connects the letters below, but for one reason or another they’ve all been on my mind recently. I thought you might enjoy them too.
I want to kiss you. I want our dream worlds to be one. I would like to see from your eyes, hear from your ears, feel with your skin, and kiss with your mouth. In order to see you from below I would like to be the shadow that is born from the soles of your feet and that lengthens along the ground upon which you walk. I want to be the water that bathes you, the light that gives you form, I wish that my substance were your substance, that your voice should come out of my throat so as to caress me from inside.
Frida Kahlo
Letter to Josep Bartolí
20th October 1946
—Translation by Hayden Herrera for Doyle New York
How any woman with a family ever put pen to paper I cannot fathom. Always the bell rings and the baker calls.
Virginia Woolf
Letter to Quentin Bell
8th June 1930
—The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 4
Our so-called leaders speak of an “honorable” withdrawal from Vietnam, but there can be no honorable conclusion to such a dishonorable war. The only decent thing we can do now is to somehow compel those moral degenerates in the White House and Pentagon to stop their cowardly attack on Vietnam and then begin at once, as best we can, to help the survivors in that devastated land rebuild their farms, homes, villages, and cities, and reconstruct their shattered culture. If, that is, they would even be willing to accept aid from our bloody hands.
Edward Abbey
Letter to Arizona Daily Star
29th December 1972
—Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
I know what I want: I want a life with people that is almost explosive in its excitement, fierce and hard and laughing and loud and gay as all hell let loose, and the rest of the time, I want them bloody damn well not to get any place near me, I want to be alone and do my work and my thinking by myself and let them kindly not come to call.
Martha Gellhorn
Letter to Hortense Flexner
22nd September 1941
—Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn
Sources closer to you than you may realize have told me that you have been making atrocious remarks about my cat. Ordinarily, I would not have believed these rumors, but recalling the way you have talked about cats in the past, I would not put it beneath you at all. Let me tell you something. Jimmy-boy. What you say has a way of getting back to me. If I hear that you have said one more thing about my cat, I am going to invite you to a fight in which I expect to beat out of you a fat amount of your yellow and treacherous shit.
William Styron
Letter to James Jones
January 22, 1962
—Selected Letters of William Styron
Your letter came as a blessing for indeed a man is blessed in his friends; and when I think of all the honest affections given me by men much too good for me I feel bitterly ashamed of my pessimism, of my ineradicable tendency to quarrel with fate. And in the depth of Your friendship You can find words that are sweeter than balsam to the soul of the scribe; after reading your messages I think a little better of myself and thus You confer on me not a small benefit O! Friend long unseen but never forgotten.
Joseph Conrad
Letter to E. L. Sanderson
24th May 1899
—The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, Volume 2
Many think pottery a little—a minor art. But no craft is minor, for whatever creative work we take up demands the whole of us—all our brains, strength, time & even soul.
Anne Dangar
Letter to Grace Crowley
27th November 1950
—Earth, Fire, Water, Air: Anne Dangar’s Letters to Grace Crowley, 1930-1951
Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rotters, the flaming sods, the snivelling, dribbling, dithering pulse-less lot that make up England today. They’ve got white of egg in their veins, and their spunk is that watery it’s a marvel they can breed.
D. H. Lawrence
Letter to Edward Garnett
3rd July 1912
—The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence
I shall think of you not only today but for weeks and weeks and only with love. Goodbye. If you knew how brave I am at not asking to see you.
Dora Carrington
Letter to Gerald Brenan
10th June 1922
—Carrington’s Letters: Her Art, Her Loves, Her Friendships
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Also just wanted to come back and say that I can't imagine Claude coming up with any of these. AI has not taken over yet.
I absolutely loved all of these. What a great collection and I agree they all kind of do belong together somehow.