Please join me in wishing a happy birthday to the following letters, all written on the first day of an October gone by.
I am very poorly today & very stupid & hate everybody & everything.
Charles Darwin
Letter to Charles Lyell
1st October 1861
—Darwin Correspondence Project
Can we get a Hollywood divorce and still be frightfully, frightfully good friends? I mean, hold hands in nightclubs and gaze deep into each other's pocketbooks for the photographers? Anyway, a lot of miscellaneous things have been bobbing up (including a low state of mind) and it seems a change would be very salutary. New hands, new eyes, new faces, new pocketbooks, new photographers. So, with quivering lip but chin up, I would like to pack up my pretties from all departments, including the best pieces of furniture from your offices and leave your bed and board…
Dawn Powell
Letter to her soon-to-be former literary agent, Carl Brandt
1st October 1948
—Selected Letters of Dawn Powell, 1913-1965
I believe that the universe is one being, all its parts are different expressions of the same energy, and they are all in communication with each other, influencing each other, therefore parts of one organic whole. The parts change and pass, or die, people and races and rocks and stars; none of them seems to me important in itself, but only the whole. This whole is in all its parts so beautiful and is felt by me to be so intensely in earnest, that I am compelled to love it, and to think of it as divine. It seems to me that the whole alone is worthy of the deeper sort of love; and that there is peace, freedom, I might say a kind of salvation, in turning one’s affections outward toward this one God, rather than inward on one’s self, or on humanity, or on human imaginations and abstractions—the world of spirits.
Robinson Jeffers
Letter to Sister Mary James
1st October 1934
—The Collected Letters of Robinson Jeffers
If you asked [the last man I worked for], he’d tell you that I’m “not very likeable, (that I) hate people, (that I) just want to be left alone, and (that I) feel too superior to mingle with the average person.” (That’s a direct quote from a memo he sent to the publisher.)
Nothing beats having good references.
Hunter S. Thompson
Job application letter to the Vancouver Sun
1st October 1958
—Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967
I know, as I know the sun will rise tomorrow, that I love you unalterably. I know it would survive any passing liking I might have for anyone else (It’s all right! don’t be afraid. I don’t like anyone else!) I know now, after five years, what a difference there is between a thing with great long strong roots, all gnarled and Rackham-like, and a love which is merely an accident of the imagination, and the person one imagines one loves might just as easily have been somebody else. You see, I don’t think a love like ours often happens. Passion happens, and habit happens, but the knowledge that one is linked and welded and soldered by a mixture of passion and habit and tenderness and friendship and circumstance and memories and, above all, by the thing one calls love, which is essentially a sense of belonging, of choice, a sense of ‘He is MINE’—I don’t think that often happens.
Vita Sackville-West
Letter to Harold Nicolson
1st October 1918
—Vita and Harold: The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson
What you ought to do is write you big lazy bastard. My god it is hard for anybody to write. I never start a damn thing without knowing 200 times I can’t write—never will be able to write a line—can’t go on—can’t get started—stuff is rotten—can’t say what I mean—know there is a whole fine complete thing and all I get of it is the bacon rinds. You would write better than anybody but the minute it becomes impossible you stop. That is the time you have to go on through and then it gets easier. It always gets utterly and completely impossible.
Thank God it does—otherwise everybody would write and I would starve to death.
Ernest Hemingway
Letter to Waldo Pierce
1st Oct 1928
—The Letters of Ernest Hemingway: Volume 2
Good-bye. If you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico — ah, that is euthanasia!
Ambrose Bierce
Letter to Lora1
1st October 1913
—The Letters of Ambrose Bierce
American journalist and writer Ambrose Bierce subsequently travelled to Mexico to witness the Mexican Revolution. He was never seen again.
These would make great motivational posters for my home office.
Darwin’s blunt “hate everybody & everything” feels oddly modern, but Hemingway’s advice turns that mood into a discipline: keep writing through the point where it feels impossible. I wonder how often the letters we treasure began in exactly that state.