Happy birthday to the following letters, all written on the eighteenth day of a September gone by.
At the age of fifty a man gradually casts off certain childish things, the quest for reputation and respectability, and he begins to look back over his own life without passion. He learns to wait, he learns to stay silent, he learns to listen, and if these good gifts must be paid for with some illnesses and weaknesses, he considers that he has made a profit from the transaction.
Hermann Hesse
Letter to his wife, Ninon
18th September 1945
—Hymn to Old Age
I hesitate to worry you, but I thought I should tell you that some enemy of yours is writing me very angry letters, and signing your name to them.
Have a good week.
Ursula Nordstrom
Letter to Hilary Knight
18th September 1964
—Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom
We are just preparing to come to fast grips with the war. At last we are going to give ourselves up to it — and everything else we are letting go. I thought we should never come to this — but we are. And the war will go on for a very long time. I knew it when I watched the Zeppelin the other night, gleaming like a new great sign in the heavens, a new, supreme celestial body. I knew by the spirit of London — game for fight, all considerations gone and I knew by the look of the Zeppelin which had assumed the heavens as its own. God knows now what the end will be.
Only I feel, that even if we are all going to be rushed down to extinction, one must hold up the other, living truth, of Right and pure reality, the reality of the clear, eternal spirit. One must speak for life and growth, amid all this mass of destruction and disintegration.
D. H. Lawrence
Letter to Harriet Monroe
18th September 1915
—The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence
What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps me in a continual state of inelegance.
Jane Austen
Letter to Cassandra Austen
18th September 1796
—Jane Austen’s Letters
I like the sense of one lighted room in the house while all the rest of the house, and the world outside, is in darkness. Just one lamp falling on my paper; it gives a concentration, an intimacy. What bad mediums letters are; you will read this in daylight, and everything will look different. I think I feel night as poignantly as you feel the separateness of human beings; one of those convictions which are so personal, so sharp, that they hurt. It seems to me that I only begin to live after the sun has gone down and the stars have come out.
Vita Sackville-West
Letter to Virginia Woolf
18 September 1925
—Love Letters: Vita and Virginia
It would be easier and pleasanter to drown myself.
George Bernard Shaw
Letter to West Edinburgh Labour Party1
18th September 1922
—Dear Mr Shaw: Selections from Bernard Shaw’s Postbag
I am more touched and moved than I can say at your asking me to be godmother. It will be such a pride and happiness. I shall love the little creature, with warmth and tenderness. It will be most wonderful to see it grow in mind and spirit and body. I shall feel it a great responsibility of love, on my side, never to fail the child, and to help bring it to its own vision of the greatness of life, to help open its eyes and let it see for itself.
I hope the child will manage to be exactly like you both. I cannot imagine more ideal parents, from every single point of view. The child will start its life with all the makings of the most noble human being imaginable. It will have all that in its nature. And beyond that, what a lovely childhood it will have, with such parents. What a horizon, what treasures of mind and spirit!
Edith Sitwell
Letter to Natasha Spender
18th September 1944
—Selected Letters of Edith Sitwell
My experience during the last 15 years of my imprisonment has taught me that, when dealing with prisoners, the average prison official does not at all consider it improper to transgress the law, to plot secretly and to brush aside the moral code. There have been notable exceptions of officers who have tried in difficult situations to carry out their duties fairly and justly and who tempered the strict letter of the law with a bit of humanism. But such men have been few and far between. Clearly the Department prefers that political prisoners, in particular, should be handled by men who are not strongly committed to any exemplary standard of conduct.
Nelson Mandela
Letter to the head of Robben Island Prison
18th September 1977
—The Prison Letters of Nelson Mandela
Shaw had been invited by the Party to stand as their Parliamentary candidate. He wasn’t especially keen. You can read more of Shaw’s grumpy letters in this earlier newsletter.