surrender

a short list of things I'm not afraid of:

--Comets.
--Choking on grapes.
--Cat scratch fever.
--Snakes.
--Foreign films.
--Pollen.
--Love.
--Buddha.
--Bad TV.
--Leap years.
--Karaoke.
--Surrender.
--Sunburn.
--Woods.
--Sex.
--Tornadoes.
--Wardrobe malfunctions.
--Complexity.
--Creativity.

Ok, maybe I'm wrong about Surrender--but I'm working on it.

beguilement

I've tried all of my life, in myriads ways -- unconsciously and consciously, painfully and precociously -- to be beguiling. To beguile. To create beguilement.

I have no idea if I've ever succeeded. But wait, is that disingenious? I mean nothing deceitful here; nothing deceptive in my guile -- as if the word is stripped of its stronger origin and only carries the charm instead. Like a love elixir you drink freely but whose precise effects you can never determine. Is it working? Maybe? Well...yes! But then, possibly, maybe not....

Reading some essays by Adam Phillips an hour or so after typing in the above, I come across this: "'You know what charm is?' the narrator of Camus's The Fall asks. 'A way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.'

Come. (while we're doing repetition...)

Two things under this heading. Both old. Unrelated as to context and to address.

“Come to me” he used to write me repeatedly, even if he was a stone’s throw away. One needs space to make such an invitation – one needs both certainty and uncertainty. One needs to feel it is a real request. At least, that is what I imagine. How much space does one man need to be able to make that request? How much distance is necessary for that traversal? I have tried to measure out that distance repeatedly since then. I have tried to find the spot in the course when the firm ground gave way. I have paced and paced, marking the territory, trying all the different metrics available.

I don’t have the answer. I don’t have the response. It isn’t mine to have. “Yes, yes,” is all I have. But what good is a yes when there is no question? Useless, pitiful yes--that’s what you tried to hide in that jeep, in that other man’s mouth – but your yes is too loud, even muffled by another’s kiss. S’s ears are blocked to that yes; his Odysseus sails past your siren’s call unimpeded, ever forgetful that he initiated the question, that your yes is his response. Stay silent, impotent siren, stay silent, damn you. Why can’t you stop speaking and writing? You fill the world with your disgusting lamentations.

promises, gifts (re-posted)

This is from elseblog as well -- it's at least 2 years old -- but I want it here now.

promises, promises

I promised someone I would write. But after a night of dreaming (preceded by so many dreamless nights) I can only wonder at the narrative thread. Why is it so easy to read? I would have wanted less temporality, less careful unfolding, less story; I would have preferred to approach it like a child ripping off the holiday wrapping paper -- only there to create invisibility and to titillate -- and surely nothing exists with certainty until it is seen framed in a box with air and tissue paper as coating. But, of course, it isn't an easy dream to read, only to follow, like Theseus follows Ariadne.

I didn't want a story, though. I have enough of those.

Sometimes we stay alive for others. (yes, I know that's a main theme of _The Hours_, but bear with me). Nameless others. Others who don't fit into our narrative threads. It's a gift. And yet, we blame our living on those to whom we call out when we feel the burden of it.

It is hard, nearly impossible, perhaps entirely futile, to give someone a gift he doesn't want. That is a story that doesn't unfold neatly the way a prim lady opens a gift without surprise, even in not-knowing she finds a way to create distance (because surprise is vulgar). That is a story that can only be written on the inside of the paper.

I have too much writing on my side. I'm tired of narratives that loop, I'm tired of what S. calls my "trapdoor memory."

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dear you

Don't believe you've won the game of who can push the other further away just because your arms are longer. Only a fool would play without understanding how magnets function. Don't believe, furthermore, that it's a game one can win. I'm already resigned to losing, but that doesn't mean you won't lose, too. Perhaps even moreso.

Don't believe in cardinal directions, your own certainty, that there's such a thing as too much mirth, or that anchors always hit bottom.

A personal note to your heart: do believe in rationality, just don't believe it will save you from anything, least of all yourself.

good cleaning, bad poetry

I keep finding things as I clean out the cobwebs of the new mac (Clio), leftovers from the transfer of the dead mac's data (Glinda the Good Witch). By things I mean writings. Little poetic nibblets I try to place into some context. Given my melancholic nature, I could have written them at any time, but combined with my need to close doors in verse, I would assume they all bear some sort of date-stamp of my comings and goings. The "you"'s are likely direct addresses, even if, like all such attempts at addressing, there are many addressees, many receivers, and the wonderful chance of destinerrance.

They are all bad, in any case, these little things: that's certain.

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when is enough enough?

No, really: when?

Is it when you get hit on in a bar by someone 10 years your younger who asks, ever so sweetly, "Now that you know I'm 25, do you think I'm too young to date you?" and your first, internal and guilty-feeling response to yourself is, "Given the summer I've had, you may be too old!".

The question isn't age. That's an easy question, or rather, the answer is easy on a case-by-case basis. The question is why. Or what. What are you seeking? Wouldn't it be easy, indeed, too easy, to say that you are trying to recapture your own youth? And don't we all know from a thousand movies and a thousand cliches that this always fails? But no, that's not it. But then, what? And again, why?

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the bearing down

This is an old one, taken from elseblog, delivered here, almost exactly one year later.

And you want to believe in the why and the wherefore, if for no other reason than wherefore is a comforting word, like an antique chair that has endured countless moves and messy children and pets and drunk mothers and formidable dust accumulation, among other ills that may befall a chair; but it is comforting in its thereness.

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rings

It's that time of the year when the time of day is measured by determining which is freshest on the stack of papers around me: coffee rings or wine rings? Coffee rings slowly brown, losing any sweet trace of sugar and cream, instead becoming more like a blood stain on a white t-shirt you find in the laundry hamper two weeks after the bloodletting. Wine rings, dusty scarlet in color, circle like snails around a folder, intermixing occasionally with the coffee rings as if together they want to make one big set of Olympic-style rings. They pretend to mark a triumph that is never certain.

Sometimes the coffee ring comes back over the wine ring, weaker and lighter, just barely traced onto the edge of a paper (a sleepy hand surely set the cup so poorly there, and pushed it farther away with a nudge); and then the little splashes of wine dribbled in a careless gesture of combustible thought, but now laying there so like erstwhile punctuation marks.

And all of this, this process, this thinking, intermingled with all this feeling (for lately, I have been feeling, and thinking-feeling, the curse, so acute) reminded me of this one Rumi poem. What are all my subtle arguments good for, anyway, I wonder, except to make some sloppy yet intricate patchwork rings around a bunch of papers and folders, things that come and go, thoughts that come and go and disintegrate? But so much falling have I done, do you know what I mean? I was made to fall. So many exquisite sky circles, the invisible sad sister of the snow angel, whose pedestrian brothers, the coffee ring and wine ring, keep me company.....

Anyway, here's the poem:

The way of love is not
a subtle argument.
The door there
is devastation.
Birds make great sky-circles
of their freedom.
How do they learn it?
They fall, and falling,
they're given wings.

- Rumi

mixing it up

If you've ever heard a good dj spin, you know that the segues they pull from song to song are not as easy as the uninitiated might assume. The way one song flows into another, or the way beats intertwine to keep you shaking your tail with the same exact groove ... these may seem effortless, but they are planned, thoughtful. I imagine the dj who pulls off an immaculate transition feels quite a lot of satisfaction, but it's not the same as the dancer, lost in the rhythm, who only feels a deepening or slackening, some kind of minor adjustment in what was already so very good. The satisfaction isn't the same; the awareness is different.

I know very little of such things, I'm just borrowing the theme. Because, you see, I know what it's like when it doesn't flow. If you've listened to one of those party-mix filters on your itunes, for example, you know the awful transitions, the accidental overlapped pairs that mix like oil and water; that do a little something nasty to the song on either end. The beats thump wrong. It feels tainted--like drinking rusty water.

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burnt pudding, you know what I mean

There are parts of the body you don't feel until they're broken. Like bones. Who feels their femur as anything more than part of a leg generally, and part of a pedestal for the body more generally, including the feet, hips, etc? It's when something snaps or cracks or pops; when an x-ray could reveal a fracture (hairline, they say sometimes, which I find utterly charming) that you become acutely aware of the bone itself. That it is longer and thicker than you thought or thinner than you thought, or just placed differently than you had expected when you came crashing down on it. "Funny, I don't remember that there...not exactly like that..."

I've never had a broken bone (knock on wood, or bone, or china, whatever works), so I'm not entirely sure of the analogy. Of course, you knew it was an analogy. Or a metaphor. Or a metonymy. (I'm not on the clock, you figure it out.) In any case, I've never felt just like this -- the physical sensation of nausea so near to me at all times. All I need do is recall, think, remember, feel in a certain way (or in several certain ways) and suddenly I'm mock heaving. The heave is real, of course, but no organic cause determines it. There are parts of the body you don't feel until they're broken, and they're not all bones apparently.

I should be smelling burnt pudding, be aphasic or Germanophobic (wait, I already am the latter), or at least beset by a grand mal, as the quaint expression went. How am I stuck here with my paltry nausea? My silly little stomach-churning anguish, my faint-feeling languish? I should find myself in an anatomical book illustration, a stick figure peeling her skin back coyly so the gaze can penetrate beneath. Am I not transparent? Do you people not see the cause and the effect? Do you not smell the burnt pudding? How can I write under these conditions?

a question I cannot answer

May I quote you, dearest Leo? "Did something precipitate his sudden lack of imagination?"

It is very telling of your character, comrade, that the word imagination is the anchor of your question. I like it. A sudden lack of imagination can stop one dead in one's tracks, or send one straight into therapy, or force one to withdraw affect entirely. What is powerful enough to stop one's ability to imagine? When things seem too perfect, maybe there's only one thing left to imagine or maybe that's how one is made to feel (by me, for example)?

One can mull over a sense of foreboding, a state of tension, but the feeling of danger? I don't know. Maybe that's the kind of thing one can't imagine one's self into or out of. It gums up the works. Full stop. Don't look back. Looking back would entail imagining, beginning to imagine again. And that would entail recognizing that something could have happened differently, that it almost did, that it still could. The 'could' leaves room for the as-yet unimagined. And that seems ... well... dangerous? Difficult? Overwhelming?

Leo, what made you imagine differently?

mornings, hating them

I"ve always been a little lazy about mornings. I think the only times I bound out of bed with energy is when I have something to do immediately--something exciting (like running a race or travelling), or something pressing (like having to finish grading or work). So it has been especially hard that this recent time has been punctuated for me by early morning clarity.

I hate early morning clarity. It literally makes me sick to my stomach; like the surge of hormones in a pregnant woman's body suddenly pooling nausea in her belly and throat, my morning clarity seizes my entire digestive tract. The snooze on the alarm isn't enough to cloud the thoughts streaming in like daylight; the thoughts are already burrowed in my mind, and only a new deep sleep would erase them. If only I had gotten drunk the night before, I think with grim sadness, I could have slept through it. But now I'm too restless for a return, so I fitfully toss around my bed, amongst pillows and cats, and I do something like moan. Moan is the right term, although no sound comes out--a silent moan into bright morning air.

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weakness

I am weak-willed. Weak-fleshed. Welcome to the world, you might be retorting smugly under your breath. Ah yes, surely. But as Rousseau said, "it's the common lot of humanity; I felt it more than another." It's perhaps not that I am more weak-willed than any other, but I feel it now in such excess... A phrase of Sappho comes to me: that "loosener-of-limbs" she calls desire, but she could have just as easily meant despair (and perhaps she did -- indeed). My tendons have given in; they gape about my body in horrible slack-jawed puddles. That's just one example.

My heart, a black barreled stove, beckons, smoky and warm. The path to it must be littered with exquisite little objects marked "drink me" and "eat me", or "come closer" and "even closer than that!". It lures the kind of Alice whose games are still running about on other boards, whose words have not yet decided to obey deixis, and whose cards have not started to take her seriously. There is another sign, it seems, just on the netherside of the little stovepipe's lid, wherein translated from some uknown tongue into a barely decipherable script are the words "run the other way"--or "pull your tendons back up"--it's hard to make it out through the smoke.

My weakness is for literature, for reference. The girl plays at the labyrinth only as long as she still believes in minotaurs needing rescue, in crumbs to be trailed behind her, and in sorties of various kinds.

If only I had something to write. If only you would wear my tendons like Humpty-Dumpty's suspenders.

would you trust a barefooted meaning?

It's this Fido business again.

“People are born and die and sometimes wear boots; meanings are not born and do not die and they never wear boots—or go barefoot either.”

--Gilbert Ryle from "The Theory of Meaning"

false coincidences, tumors and imaginary dogs

I do not teach what I want to teach; not often. This is due to a certain positionality, not to my own desire. Perhaps it is my own desire that put me in this position, but that is no matter. I developed a class on memory after several months of deteriorating memory, with no intentional or causal desire therein. I was not obsessed with the memory lapses and losses; I affectionately called them collectively "the tumor", and I went about the world constructing the idea of a little marble-shaped pebble in my brain, pressing down on something and causing things to go awry. Of course, I knew better; this was the way to describe it that attributed absolutely no meaning to it--who can be expected to control a tumor that suddenly springs into the brain, like a lazy cheerleader springing to pert attention with a smiling bob of the head?

Vapid tumor--what can be done? I treated the whole situation more like a sitcom than anything else, and the occasional stroke of anxiety was treated to the same derision, even offered up under the "absentminded professor" stereotype for general amusement. I stayed away from all analytic postures towards my memory question (while I poured over such postures in relation to the memory question). It was someone else who pointed out to me the odd coincidence of me researching and teaching a class on memory after months of having shilled my deadpan brain tumor through its paces. Why yes, how odd, now that you point it out. (Oh, come now, it was better than denying any coincidence at all, herr dr. at my head).

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house cleaning

A housecleaning tip comes from Adrienne Rich, via Jules (thank you to her for drawing my attention here). It's from a poem called "Living in Sin":

She had thought the studio would keep itself;
no dust upon the furniture of love.
Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal,
the panes relieved of grime.
A plate of pears, a piano with a Persian shawl,
a cat stalking the picturesque amusing mouse
had risen at his urging.
Not that at five each separate stair would writhe
under the milkman's tramp; that morning light
so coldly would delineate the scraps
of last night's cheese and three sepulchral bottles;

I've always disliked that in our times we constantly refer to relationships as "hard work" -- I understand the comparison, but I think there's something stultifying for us to reduce every aspect of our lives to the rules and descriptions of labor. Alienated labor, no less. But this poem captures the bewildered awakening to the fact that love accumulates dust. That someone must take the decision to dust that furniture, or to ignore the dust and live joyously and messily through it, or to be confused and turn to some other form (poetry?), or to be disappointed and move on once the dust accumulates (surely there's something defective with the armoir of love if it can't keep dust away, the latter seem to say).

If it's labor to dust the furniture of love, though, it's not to be confused with a time-clock, a salary, a list of duties, the fulfillment felt from achieving goals in that realm. Is it too cute by half to say there's something like "a labor of love"? What I mean is that love is not 'hard work", relationships are not work in the typical sense of the word. No more than being alive is work. It is, of course, yes, yes--but not in the typical sense--and to reduce it to this precise manifestation is a limitation that leads to alienation. Rich's image of a young woman discovering with astonishment dust and messy traces where she expected a magical continuity of brightness is thus a fitting image. No one is shocked that dust appears in that other realm of labor ("what did you expect??!"), but in the realm of love, one has to do more than become accomodated to the fact of the dust. One has to come to love the squeaky stairs under the relentless milkman's step. Astonishment, but not alienation.

My Personal Disaster Management Act of 2007

Let's play at ill-fitting analogies. If my break-up with J. is a hurricane, then I'm FEMA. My friends are the Red Cross (and other concerned citizens) who sweep in with assured competence and blankets, rescuing and comforting. But FEMA--what a mess!! Having seen this one coming on -- it's not like there weren't warning signs, and we all knew the levee was vulnerable in spots -- FEMA should have been more prepared. FEMA should have been able to do more pre-emptively, pro-actively. But this wasn't recognized as what it would become when it was just a little thing brewing on the horizon -- there are so many types of tempests, after all, even those in a teacup.

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St. Etienne in technicolor--memoirish

Once in Paris, a felicitous encounter that since serves as prototype for letting myself be unexpectedly taken by chance.

Several of us are walking home from a bar in the 5th, in the night that Paris allows. It's darker than one might imagine, the city of light, especially in the medieval offshoots of tourist districts. The darkness forms a cocoon of sound as our drunken footsteps echo through the muffled decorum. (There is a way in which drunken students too in love with literature inhabit the landscape of Paris--being there is a comfort and a shock to the system, through which one discovers a new way of being intoxicated.) On this occasion, the city itself seems buttressed by our gleeful gloom. There is no need to invent love in Paris, nor history, nor life. Glum little pupils of the night, we know this, and feel the hearty pulse of our uselessness to be both sobering and comical. The result is a dour gaity as we flit through the night scene like shadows on some black-and-white street-scene Paris photo that at least one of us had hanging on a dorm room wall somewhere.

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simple greeting on the 14th

On this day I say love whatever sustains you, even if it eats you up, like the addict loves her habit, his killer of pains, her intensifier of dasein. If sustenance is toxic, this doesn't mean you won't learn to love yourself better and more. Let this day call you to look at that and those you love; just look. Tomorrow can begin changing, if changing needs be. You don't have to seize, hold, drink down, succor, proclaim, no matter what the tv says.

Look the way an infant looks, with all its being both concentrated and dispersed, feeling a different axis of gravity (one whose rules we can't chart). There's a love in that both modest and extravagant. But for those of us with words more than anything, we can jangle them around like a sachet of teeth hidden under the pillow, hoping to attract good spirits; we can string them together, making jewels and knives, making occasions for coming and for leaving (love's first cousin, incestuous and innocently sinister.) My friends, you sustain me, and words, but most of all you. So, take these:

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desperately seeking Stendhal

I was up all night, or nearly, trying to find a single passage in La Vie de Henri Brulard. It would have been much easier if I owned the book. Instead of searching pages, I was searching google. But this one passage, that I knew almost by heart anyway but had to see for myself, had to see it, mattered more than anything. The hours pulsed on, tangents crept down my ankles and took root in the carpet, and meanwhile I sorted through mentions and gestures towards and knowing smiles and bad summaries and notes for the bac and everything else except a goddamn direct quote of the piece. And it's famous, this bit, I keep insisting to myself--I'm flabbergasted! If you look up (in a desparate pique) "Proust quote" on google, you get a million little gems. You can send them to your friends in email, without typing them or translating them yourself--it's quite efficient [not that I advocate efficiency with literature, mind you, but so be it, shameful little truths]. But Stendhal is another matter. Oh sure, you get some quotes. Try it, as I'm sure some of you are in another open browser, just now doing. But not from HB, and/or not THE ONE. [of course, I just then assumed in writing that I have readers, but much like Stendhal I know differently, hence the endless need for writing, for prefaces and re-prefacing, the postpreface, the posthumous preface, which it will all have been one day...]

The quote was supposed to somehow sum up the state of my love life -- a solidarity of feeble dust-scratching between me and Marie-Henri Beyle, or Henri Brulard, or whoever so scratches into the dust a collection of names and ponders them. Not in a Sesame Street way (one of these things is not like the other, a sing-song matching game), but in the way of a question that is at the same time an impossible gesture of inscription. The set isn't complete, and even a man out walking with a stick knows that. They repeat. That's why the letters can be interchangeable--and we like to add "but never the people"--but I'm not so sure. It depends on the view taken, and it's no accident that this bit of dust-scratching happens in a place with a view out over a city (or a town--you see, I can't remember, and I couldn't find the quote). Of course, that's where you go wrong -- the view over, from above, the mastery of the question applied, the list, the summing up of "the state of my love life" -- that's reading in the wrong way, although such a reading is invited. Clearly. But such would be to close the set, not by scratching the final initial, adding the "so that's it", drawing lines of similarity, or any such maneuver; but simply by extricating oneself from the dust. It is not only by manner of memory, or manner of reflection that one finds oneself there.

It will have been ironic, in the Alanis way at least, to think that I will have devoted a good part of my intellectual life to reading about, thinking about and writing about love; and yet, perhaps no one will have asked it such fervent questions, put it into such contortions of interrogation-under-torture, into such radical doubt, as the men who have claimed to have loved me. It is divine comedy, at least sitcom style, that the questions from the not-set go in ways I haven't prepared for, in ways I can't write about "for tenure", in ways whose repetition I can see but not understand, in ways that leave me seeking Stendhal on google at 2am, looking for something I already know by heart.

love: sinking or floating?

"Buoyancy" --by Rumi

Love has taken away my practices
and filled me with poetry.

I tried to keep quietly repeating,
No strength but yours
but I couldn't.

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The Devil's Backbone-memoirish

In a dingy state park near my hometown there is a path up a hill known as The Devil’s Backbone. This particular path on this hill was mythical to me as a child. On our annual campout there the possibility of mounting The Devil’s Backbone was a terrifying and tantalizing challenge. This is because I half-believed that the twisty, knotty path was the actual devil’s spine, fixed for all eternity into place by some odd decree of the modern world, the same way I believed that he still lived in hell and that it was an effective means of showing my love for God to sit on the playground and flip ol' satan the bird through the asphalt, sometimes for the entire recess.

I was still at the age where the law of non-contradiction has not yet taken hold, so it was entirely possible for the devil’s backbone to be fixed into a gnarled path up a steep hill crowded with trees branches and roots and for him to be roaming the world tempting mortals with all manners of tricks while also ruling over the hellfires. For a few years I was much more concerned with the devil than I was with God or Jesus or anything else besides the nightly kneeling prayer of “Now I lay me down to sleep”—this latter because I knew that it might be the last thing I said before I saw the devil—or God, hence the prayer, but you never could tell – and anyway, God –or the devil, but you never could tell-- had a penchant for stealing children from my family in the middle of the night. I was forewarned.

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On Morbid Procrastination

What happens when procrastination stops being polite and starts being real?? Much like that voice-over intro to MTV's "The Real World" (which first few seasons had me spellbound in the 90s, even though I know I couldn't have lived anywhere with regular cable access at the time...), I ask myself this question. MTV asked it because they were interested in the "what happens" after the polite. But I'm asking from a different angle. I'd like to find out if there isn't a way to stop myself before the really real of procrastination cometh--before it becomes morbid. And I don't even care what happens after because, actually, there is no AFTER. Morbid procrastination is a state without chronology, just timeless anxiety, movement stalled.

Generally, procrastination can be pleasant, diversionary, leading to a mild build-up of tension that gushes out in a swell of activity that leaves one looking back, stunned, "I got all that done at the last minute?". That's the polite version, the one that seems like just another time management technique, if a less efficient one. Time exists in that version, kinda gently elongated...I imagine it looks like the droop or slump of a ribbon that is not pulled tight at either end, but hangs there with the slackest of tension. Pull it taut and voila--the ends can be tied to something snugly and it looks quite tidy. This is not the kind of procrastination I'm intereste in. It's the other kind, the impolite kind that grips me.

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insomniac stream of consciousness--addressed

This is an older writing from elseblog -- just posting here to keep my fragments tidy.
***********************************
The damn pills don't work. We are just talking. What are we talking about?
Hard to recount. Do we start over every day, a blank slate that some good
pupil has washed clean with turpentine and aloe? Noxious fumes
never penetrate, they envelop; they soothe. They bring false comfort,
like suicide. But all comfort appears false.
Will I remember that in your arms? Hard to recall.

I still believe in comfort, and sorrow, and sparking flint.
I am softsoftsoft...I am a box of kindling heavy with dewdrops.
There is no satisfaction in finding a twig that won't snap underfoot.
Who doesn't cry out when broken? A smoldering fire is no joy for
eyes used to firecrackers. My bending is supple, unyielding, insufferable.
You can break your neck on it if you don't watch out.
There is no narrative trace, no guiding thread,
Ariadne would order us both shot.
We don't deserve a labyrinth if we are only climbing out of our own skins.
There are questions one should bother to dream--bulls don't just show up on your doorstep.

No one decides, although one may pretend otherwise midway. Who holds the log book, recording all these dank comings and goings? But we're not writing a book. There is neither truth nor lie here. Worse, there's no fiction in our fiction. There is no address between us, there is only the approach. An eternal approach

burning, an unsent letter

I should be working, but I can't. I am distracted by these letters at my feet. This stack of letters from over 10 years ago. Uncanny repetitions in my present-- in form only, but the form evokes the content, takes my mind, wraps it around this thing that was -- bring these letters out of hiding. Among the stack from you is a letter I wrote but never mailed. It is handwritten, and I see the me of the past, licking the envelope, addressing it; I sealed it, and later unsealed it. I don't know why. Did it remain unsent or did I re-write it? I no longer remember. There were so many letters, so many repetitions. My handwriting on the envelope looks childish -- big, careful, almost looping. I wasn't a child, and yet ... And yet, wasn't I?

I re-read your letters with a little amazement. You were my age now (maybe even a year younger) when you wrote them, when you wrote things like these, just one little parcel of the hundreds of pages that for some reason haunt me tonight:

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