A scrapbook of things to share with you, whoever you may be.
"Feel, feel, I say—feel for all you’re worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live." - Henry James
“I want to lie down like a tired child and weep away this life and my diary shall receive me on its downy pillow. Most children do not know what they cry for; nor do I, altogether.”
“Things become very familiar to me so that I sometimes think humanity is a vast wave, undulating, the same; I mean; the same emotions here that were before. “Please have some tea, we shall be hurt if you don’t accept your hospitality.” Accordingly we do; the same queer brew of human fellowship is brewed and people look the same and joke in the same way and come to these odd superficial agreements. All of it makes me profoundly sad.”
“It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.”
“But, looking for a phrase, I found none to stand beside your name.”
“She seemed to have a melancholy tendency, and to revive her spirits she had recourse to an infallible remedy — she looked out of the window.”
“My mind hums hither and thither with its veil of words.”
“So the week slips or sticks through my fingers; rage, misery, joy, dulness, elation mix; I am the usual battlefield of emotions.”
“All these things happen in one second and last for ever.”
“There must be another life, she thought, sinking back into her chair, exasperated. Not in dreams; but here and now, in this room, with living people. She felt as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice with her hair blown back; she was about to grasp something that just evaded her. There must be another life, here and now, she repeated. This is too short, too broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves.”
vwvw:
28th March, 1941
Dearest,
I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that - everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer.
I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.
V.
“The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.”
