Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
June 15 - August 27, 2022
but the impact on letter-writing – so gradual and so fundamental – has slipped by like an English summer. Something
Emails are a poke, but letters are a caress, and letters stick around to be newly discovered.
The toil has gone, and with it some of the rewards.
Octavius to his brother Candidus, greetings. The hundred pounds of sinew from Marinus – I will settle up . . . I have several times written to you that I have bought about five thousand modii [about a peck] of ears of grain, on account of which I need cash. Unless you send me some cash, at least five hundred denarii, the result will be that I shall lose what I have laid out as a deposit, about three hundred denarii, and I shall be embarrassed. So I ask you, send me some cash as soon as possible. The hides [of] which you write are at Cataractonium [Catterick, a tanning centre] . . . I would
...more
Do you ask why such flight does not help you? It is because you flee along with yourself. You must lay aside the burdens of the mind; until you do this, no place will satisfy you.
although you give me pleasure mingled with pain.
You may prefer death to the lingering torture of reading them.
‘Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Acquaintance: a person known. Friend: one attached to another by affection and esteem.
‘The letter should be strong in characterization,’
which is ardent and spirited in exhortation, soothing and friendly in consolation.’
. . . But if you have already determined of me, and that not only my death, but an infamous slander must bring you the enjoying of your desired happiness; then I desire of God, that he will pardon your great sin therein, and likewise mine enemies, the instruments thereof, and that he will not call you to a strict account of your unprincely and cruel usage of me, at his general judgment-seat, where both you and myself must shortly appear, and in whose judgment I doubt not (whatsoever the world may think of me) mine innocence shall be openly known, and sufficiently cleared . . . If ever I found
...more
The use of letters in drama goes back to the ancients, to Euripides and Plautus. But under Shakespeare’s direction they become something else, not merely a vehicle for news but practically characters in themselves, a constant prop as well as a function of the plot (and for many actors the prop has served as a thankful breather, something they could effectively read rather than learn).
If an audience wants to believe a drama, even an historical one, it is required to witness the interplay of letters as a regular part of the action. For letters were rapidly becoming a regular part of life.
You fascinate and weaken me, and make me feel strong.
You have smashed my perimeter defences, I am all of a hub-bub, and as I write my cheeks are red and I am hot.
You are a terrific love-maker by letter. I can but wonder what you are like at it in the soft, warm, yielding, panting flesh.
am ‘all for you, dear’ and the prospect of soaking in you, luxuriously for a while, of touching you where you will let me, from here, is absorbingly, naturally, before us.
Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.
have a figure. I want, very much, to touch you, to feel you, to see you as you naturally are, to hear you. I want to sleep and awaken with you. I want to live with you. I want to be strong and I want to be weak with you. I want you.
. It was unwise to question God’s actions, ‘as though we could direct him to do them better’.
Fiesta de San Fermin de Pamplona,
May God’s curse light upon you all: may your houses be as open and common to all Excise Officers as your wifes and daughters were to me when I stood for your scoundrel corporation.
no matter how original we consider ourselves to be, it is evident that our emotions, motives and desires have echoes in the past. We’re not so special; someone else has almost certainly been there first.
Can you see that it is gradually dawning on me that you are too good to be missed? Will you tell me that we may be together really one day, and you will hit me if I start wanting to go? Remember now, that you have a hand in shaping me and making me, and that I want you to speak up where and when you like.
When I am writing you I seem to be nearer you. I want to think of you and nothing else. I want to underline a dozen times that I need you and love you. I want you to the exclusion of everything else. I want to surround you and enfold you.
As the Atlantic is so broad and deep, ought we not rather to esteem it a beneficent miracle that messages can arrive at all; that a little slip of paper will skim over all these weltering floods, and other inextricable confusions; and come at last, in the hand of the Twopenny Postman, safe to your lurking-place, like green leaf in the bill of Noah’s Dove?’*
some people who got a lot of post thought it would be fun to collect the set (while everyone else thought they ought to get out more).
I’d like to creep away somewhere and do a bit of hard brooding about you, but I have to go through the motions of behaving normally, like you.
Sometimes I think it is falling out quickly, and at others I persuade myself there are positive signs of growth. It is very convenient to have my present amount, but I really do hope I hold on to it.
I think of your breasts more than is good for me.
‘A letter always feels to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend’.
I had strawberries today, pal, they were grand. I need hardly say I prefer you to all the strawberries yet or to be.
Dear, dear, dearest Elizabeth, what are you doing to me, what are we doing to each other? How did I not see you, why was I blind, what can I do? I do not want to use ordinary words and usual language to tell you how dear you are to me, how I ache and wait for you.
Turn a
city into a stage, make the British Army the players and hear us warm to the genuine joyous proud applause of the appreciative audience.
How can I tell you I want to implant myself; how my lips need to meet your flesh everywhere, to kiss your hair, your ears, your lips, to kiss your breasts; to kiss you, to put my face between your legs, in homage, in love, in obedience – and because I must.
You are my aim in life, you are my goodness, and I must and will claim you, claim you for ever. I want to run my hands on, over, around the vital, vibrant spot. I want to warm my hands by being there. I want to warm you, inflame you, too. It is a wonderful thought to think that one day I may really touch wondrous, lovely you.
Funny how people get the urge at Xmas time for a holocaust of present giving, you should see the crowds in town, all trying to buy what isn’t there. Dear oh dear what a game.
I want a brighter word than bright, a fairer word than fair. I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer days.
I think of you. I think of you. I think of you. I will write as much as I am able, but bear with me as I have much to do. I love you.
There was a reason why so many of the early interactive computer pioneers were bald.
But in some ways, Google was just following tradition. Our history is littered with the ashes of burnt writing, a violent act against ourselves, but a common wish. Why shouldn’t emails disappear as quickly as they arrive? The most convincing reason is, hopefully, spread over the past 400 pages.
W.H. Auden had written in Night Mail in 1936: our heart quickens at the sound of the postman’s knock, for who wants to think themselves forgotten?
Urgh 🤮🤢
time. I would prefer not to get married, but want you to agree on the point.
The events in Europe are less and less meaningful, the staggering waste of our lives – and what I must do in the meantime – is sickening.
what will survive of us is love.
We will not know it was the last until months or years later, when we have glanced back to acknowledge a passing, like the last hair to whiten, or the last lovemaking.
Tinkety tonk old fruit, & down with the Nazis
