Lord what a repulsive remark to end with!
On this day in letters
Happy birthday to the following letters, all written on the twelfth day of a November gone by.
Now that this part of the year has come round again, I am automatically reminded of the early days of our friendship—falling leaves in the parks, and wet pavements along the deserted embankment, and the heart’s ease through confidence shared—the trust established. There will always be that part of the one of us, in the other — bound, as Meynell expressed it so beautifully—in the tissue of time; and truly ‘one cannot untouch that touch’ which remains forever, consciously or unconsciously embedded through all the years, in the heart’s core. I sometimes feel that our real tragedy in this world is mutability—an inability to transfer our thoughts, untarnished and whole, from mind to mind with absolute understanding. So many of the innermost thoughts are unspeakable, and one finds oneself slipping into worn clichés through the stumbling effort of articulation. I am just trying to say thanks, dear friend, for all that we ever shared together.
Kenneth Williams
Letter to Valentine Orford
12th November 1951
—The Kenneth Williams Letters
Very depressed. Rain all day. No money. Can’t write.
Evelyn Waugh
Letter to Lady Mary Lygon
12th November 1931
—The Letters Of Evelyn Waugh
Well there were some excitements in London yesterday1. I could have wished you had been with us all. When the guns were fired at 11 o’clock I thought it was a good joke on the part of some junkers to come over and bomb us while the cats here were at play. But it soon turned out to be Peace with a big P. Instantly everyone in the city dashed out of offices & boarded the buses. It was interesting seeing how the different stratas of people looked travelling from Hampstead. Seeing first the slum girls & cockney people dancing. Pathetic scenes of an elderly plumber nailing up a single small flag over the door. Then the scenes became wilder as one reached Camden Town & more & more frantic as one approached Trafalgar Square. Office boys & girls, officers, majors, races all heaped on taxis, and army vans driving round & round the place waving flags. In the Strand the uproar was appalling.
Dora Carrington
Letter to Noel Carrington
12th November 1918
—Carrington’s Letters: Her Art, Her Loves, Her Friendships
There are many thousands of us in this mad fungoid city who’d be happy to ride bicycles to work each day if only we didn’t have to fear being knocked into surgery, intensive care and wheelchairs by some marginal humanoid with a penis problem driving his double-barreled eight-cylinder tractor-wheeled 4x4 high-rider up and down the city streets. Reserve at least a few streets for human-powered traffic only, and at no expense whatever to us taxpayers; with vast reduction in private expenses, at great benefit to the public air and the public health and the public treasury and the public equanimity, we could make Tucson once more what it once was—a decent, clean and pleasant town for full-grown human beings. With its balmy, arid climate and gently rolling terrain, our city offers the perfect outdoor laboratory for such a simple and worthy experiment.
Edward Abbey
Letter to the Tuscon Daily Citizen
12th November 1981
—Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
Most people don’t know at all how beautiful the world is and how much splendor is revealed in the smallest things, in some flower, a stone, the bark of a tree, or a birch leaf. Grown-up people, who have business and cares and worry about a lot of trifles, gradually lose their eye entirely for these riches which children, when they are alert, soon notice and love with all their hearts. And yet the finest thing would be if all people would always stay in this relationship like those children, with simple and reverent feelings, and if they would not lose the power to rejoice as deeply in a birch leaf or in the feather of a peacock or the pinion of a hooded crow as in a great mountain range or a splendid palace.
The small is as little small as the big is big. There is a great and eternal beauty throughout the world, and it is scattered justly over the small things and the big; for in the important and essential there is no injustice on the whole earth.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Letter to Helmuth Westhoff
12th November 1901
Now dearest Dadie, you must write me a long letter about the future of the English novel.
Lord what a repulsive remark to end with!
Virginia Woolf
Letter to George Ryalnds
12th November 1931
—The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol.5
On 11th November 11, 1918, the Armistice was signed, ending World War I.
What a way to bring Nov. 11th alive. Imagine being there when peace was declared.
Excellent. Nice letters. Good sprinkling from humans. Thank you.