Love love love

There is only one happiness in life; to love and be loved. -George Sand.

I am a sucker for love. Yes I roll my eyes at the couples on the train excavating each others mouths with their tongues. Sure I cannot bear to watch public declarations of love, and I scroll past gushing posts on Instagram. It is true that I have never found a proposal romantic, and while everyone else is in tears at “The best proposal ever omg”, I am sat there with a blank look on my face wondering what all the fuss is about. But goddammit I have seen The Notebook two times and if that doesn’t make me a soppy lover-girl then what does?

Seriously though, I do love love. I love how two people, who were once strangers, can come to care deeply for each other; how their lives become blissfully intertwined and the thought of a life without the other is unbearable to consider. It is truly a blessing to be able to find another soul whose presence eases the burden and drudgery of life- a Soulmate. It must be amazing to have a companion so one does not have to face this world alone; a companion to help stave off the inevitable loneliness that is always lurking around waiting to pounce.

“How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this, I need someone to pour myself into.”- Sylvia Plath

I like proper love, not the toxic mess people refer to as passion a la Gossip Girl and other dramas. When I say love, I don’t mean the Chucks and Blairs of the world who continue to hurt and betray each other with words and actions but claim they have a passionate relationship. I like love: Two people who genuinely care about each other’s well-being, and who do things to make life easier and happier for the other.

“I want you to laugh, to kill all your worries, to love you, to nourish you. Oh sweet bitterness, I will soothe you and heal you. I will bring you roses. I too have been covered with thorns.” -Rumi

I love love in all its forms; romantic love between lovers of course, but also love among friends, sibling love, love between mother (or father) and child, human and pet, Lioness and Cub. While I may not care for the public/performative aspect, I do enjoy the little glimpses of love. One of my favourite ways of experiencing this is through letters. Perhaps it’s the fact that letter writing is a dead art, and frankly unnecessary in today’s age, but letters are just so romantic, much more so than text messages or direct messages on social media. Another thing is the effort people in the olden days put in their letters; honestly people seemed to have better grammar and way with words back in the day. I guess all the shorthand we use nowadays has limited our expression to some degree.

Every now and then, I come across a letter written by one lover to another and I devour it hungrily- first racing through it and then going over it slowly, absorbing all the words and letting them wash over me.

Listen, some people have loved and been loved in this life-lucky bastards. I will now share some of my favourite love letters.

To start of with is this beautiful letter from Physicist Richard Feynman. The letter is so moving that I wrote a post just for it. When Richard wrote the letter to his wife, she had been dead two years, and the letter was only read 30 years later after his own death. This was a love that transcended time and death, a love not predicated on what one could get in return.

I adore you, sweetheart.

I know how much you like to hear that — but I don’t only write it because you like it — I write it because it makes me warm all over inside to write it to you.

***

And now it is clearly even more true — you can give me nothing now yet I love you so that you stand in my way of loving anyone else — but I want you to stand there. You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive.

Next up is this letter from Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf which grips from the very first line. “I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia”. When I think of love letters that is the first sentence that comes to my mind.

I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way.

When I first came across this letter years ago, I knew nothing about Henry Miller or Anais Nin. I still don’t know anything about Henry Miller, but I have become a bit more familiar with Anais Hill. It is interesting that Anais was married to another man when this letter was written, and though she remained married to him till her death, she had lots of affairs, and even another marriage while still married! When she died she essentially left behind two widowers. What a woman.

Henry wrote the letter to Anais after spending time in her house while her husband was away. It is so passionate and powerful, and I wonder what went through her mind as she read it.

Don’t expect me to be sane anymore. Don’t let’s be sensible. It was a marriage at Louveciennes—you can’t dispute it. I came away with pieces of you sticking to me; I am walking about, swimming, in an ocean of blood, your Andalusian blood, distilled and poisonous.

***

Here I am back and still smouldering with passion, like wine smoking. Not a passion any longer for flesh, but a complete hunger for you, a devouring hunger.

The Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov enjoyed a lifelong romance with his wife and partner Vera. Naturally they exchanged lots of lovey dovey letters for the forty six years that they were together. The letters have been complied into a tome titled Letters to Vera, snippets of which can be seen here. I was particularly drawn to the excerpt below and I read it over and over again. This is the most succinct description of a companion I have come across, just someone you can tell the most random things that come to mind.

Yes, I need you, my fairy-tale. Because you are the only person I can talk with about the shade of a cloud, about the song of a thought — and about how, when I went out to work today and looked a tall sunflower in the face, it smiled at me with all of its seeds.

When I first read this letter, I came undone. It was written a long long time ago in South Korea by the pregnant widow of the man it was addressed to. The letter was found on his chest when his tomb was discovered by some nosy archaeologists. This, along with the Feynman letter, highlight the other side of loving someone; the fact that they could be taken away from you. It is nice to find your soulmate, but falling in love only increases the likelihood of getting hurt. Imagine outliving the love of your life by several decades. Unbearable. But still as they say, it is better to have loved and lost, than to never have loved at all.

How did you bring your heart to me and how did I bring my heart to you? Whenever we lay down together you always told me, “Dear, do other people cherish and love each other like we do? Are they really like us?” How could you leave all that behind and go ahead of me?

I already posted an excerpt from this love letter from Jean Paul Sartre and it is so precious that I have to post it again. I always thought he wrote this to his main squeeze Simone de Beauvoir, but it turns out he wrote it to another Simone (Jollivet).

“Tonight I love you in a way that you have not known in me: I am neither worn down by travels nor wrapped up in the desire for your presence. I am mastering my love for you and turning it inwards as a constituent element of myself. This happens much more often than I admit to you, but seldom when I’m writing to you. Try to understand me: I love you while paying attention to external things. At Toulouse I simply loved you. Tonight I love you on a spring evening. I love you with the window open. You are mine, and things are mine, and my love alters the things around me and the things around me alter my love.”

This letter was written by Milada Horakova to her teenage daughter Jana, the day before she was executed for allegedly plotting to overthrow the Czech communist regime. It is different to the other love letters because it’s not between lovers, and the circumstances are sad, but I could still feel the love she had for her child. The letter is heartbreaking because I cannot fathom what she must have been going through writing this letter, knowing she would never see her daughter again and watch her grow up. I also cannot imagine what the daughter felt reading this letter knowing she would never see her mother again. It is quite sad. In this letter she tried her best to guide her daughter as much as she could in a letter, even giving her skincare tips, and critiquing her hairdo. Even in the letter, she mentions her love for her husband (Jana’s father). Milada was eventually exonerated after her death and received a posthumous national award. She was truly a remarkable woman.

My only little girl Jana,

God blessed my life as a woman with you. As your father wrote in the poem from a German prison, God gave you to us because he loved us. Apart from your father’s magic, amazing love you were the greatest gift I received from fate.

***

And so, my only young daughter, little girl Jana, new life, my hope, my future forgiveness, live! Grasp life with both hands! Until my last breath I shall pray for your happiness, my dear child!

I recently watched Glenn Close in The Wife, a movie about a woman whose husband wins the Nobel Prize in Literature. When receiving the award, the husband makes a speech acknowledging his wife and sharing the honour with her. Now if you have watched the film, you know that all is not as it seems. Still the speech was the most memorable part of the film for me, and on its own is really quite lovely.

Really this honour should go to someone else-my wife Joan. Joan truly is my better half; she has made it possible for me to find the stillness as well as the noise to create my body of work. Without her, I certainly wouldn’t be standing here tonight; I’d be at home, staring at a blank piece of paper, my mouth open in stupefaction. My wife is my sanity, my conscience, and the inspiration for every decent impulse I have ever had. Joan you are my muse, my love, my soul and I share this honour with you.

I will end this post with this letter from Humphrey Bogart to Lauren Bacall (who he fondly referred to as Slim). They had a complicated relationship, with him being 25 years older, and on his third marriage when they started dating. Regardless of all that, this letter warmed my heart a lot.

“Slim darling, you came along and into my arms and into my heart and all the real true love I have is yours – and now I’m afraid you won’t understand and that you’ll become impatient and that I’ll lose you – but even if that happened, I wouldn’t stop loving you for you are my last love and all the rest of my life I shall love you and watch you and be ready to help you should you ever need help.

All the nice things I do each day would be so much sweeter and so much gayer if you were with me. I find myself saying a hundred times a day, ‘If Slim could only see that’ or ‘I wish Slim could hear this.’ I want to make a new life with you – I want all the friends I’ve lost to meet you and know you and love you as I do – and live again with you, for the past years have been terribly tough, damn near drove me crazy. You’ll soon be here, Baby, and when you come you’ll bring everything that’s important to me in this world with you.”

Sigh. L’amour!

Pretty Hurts

I love beauty in all forms- in art, in nature, and of course in people. As revered as beauty is, it is also often denigrated as lacking in substance. I wrote a post about this a while back. Recently I came across a similar sentiment in Gail Honeyman’s debut novel Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, and I liked it so much I decided to post it here.

“I feel sorry for beautiful people. Beauty, from the moment you possess it, is already slipping away, ephemeral. That must be difficult. Always having to prove that there’s more to you, wanting people to see beneath the surface, to be loved for yourself, and not your stunning body, sparkling eyes or thick, lustrous hair. In most professions, getting older means getting better at your job, earning respect because of your seniority and experience. If your job depends on your looks, the opposite is true—how depressing. Suffering other people’s unkindness must be difficult too; all those bitter, less attractive people, jealous and resentful of your beauty. That’s incredibly unfair of them. After all, beautiful people didn’t ask to be born that way. It’s as unfair to dislike someone because they’re attractive as it is to dislike someone because of a deformity.”

I was also reminded of this fabulous headline I saw last year about the newly crowned Miss South Africa; “I had to come to terms with being so beautiful“. I remember laughing when I saw it, like “okay girl, you speak your truth hunnaaay“. To be honest, at first I thought it was a joke, a silly tabloid headline until I read her own words. I’m sure a lot of people saw that and rolled their eyes thinking “Why the f**k is she whining about being beautiful blah blah”. Not that I can relate to this, but I do think her experiences are valid, and they cannot just be looked down upon because we think it’s ridiculous aka cannot relate.

Another time I came across a Youtube Video featuring the British singer Jorja Smith, and one of the comments were something to the effect of “She needs to be held accountable for her beauty.” Huh what?

I do believe that a lot people try to exorcise their insecurities through these seemingly innocuous attacks on conventionally attractive people. Of course there is the flip side where attractive people automatically get opportunities on the strength of their looks, but that’s not the point here. What is the point? Dunno. I just wanted to share a quote I liked.

Spare a thought for the beautiful will you? 🙂

Like Air.

There are many reasons to read: for enjoyment, to broaden one’s mind, to improve one’s vocabulary and so on. But few things compare to the pleasure of reading a book, and seeing the writer so eloquently express in words feelings that you have, and those you did not even know you had; thoughts that have been cramped in your head which you couldn’t find the right words to articulate. The aha! moment when you come across that passage that so deeply resonates with you.

One recurring theme in this blog, and really my life, is that of loneliness. I have been lonely for a long time, almost half my life, but I did not even fully understand this until I started coming across writings on loneliness.

Sylvia Plath is one of those writers who almost always has a quote for my every mood. Even before I read The Bell Jar, I had come across her quotes on the internet and thought “wow! This is exactly how I feel!” Recently I have had this aha! moment a few more times; particularly through two books. The first is The Lonely City by Olivia Laing. While reading the book I took a picture of a passage in the book that I related to so much. I recently came across the picture and it hit me hard all over again. In one paragraph Ms. Laing manages to sum up everything about my life.

“I wanted very much not to be where I was. In fact part of the trouble seemed to be that where I was wasn’t anywhere at all. My life felt empty and unreal and I was embarrassed about its thinness, the way one might be embarrassed about wearing a stained or threadbare piece of clothing. I felt like I was in danger of vanishing, though at the same time the feelings I had were so raw and overwhelming that I often wished I could find a way of losing myself altogether, perhaps for a few months, until the intensity diminished. If I could have put what I was feeling into words, the words would have been an infant’s wail: I don’t want to be alone. I want someone to want me. I’m lonely. I’m scared. I need to be loved, to be touched, to be held.”

This is exactly how I feel. I could not put it any better, any clearer. This is it. Every word, every sentence, every line.

My life felt empty and unreal and I was embarrassed about its thinness, the way one might be embarrassed about wearing a stained or threadbare piece of clothing.  Wow.

It is comforting to know that others have felt this way too, and that they have come out on the other side. Seeing my life summed up through someone else’s experiences and words is surreal, and it makes me realise that I am not alone in feeling the way I feel.

A few years ago, I wrote the following poem (if I can even call it that), in an attempt to express the way I felt about my life.

I float through life
Like air
Attaching to nothing
Feeling nothing

But this is what I was trying to say:

“I do exist, don’t I? It often feels as if I’m not here, that I’m a figment of my own imagination. There are days when I feel so lightly connected to the earth that the threads that tether me to the planet are gossamer thin, spun sugar. A strong gust of wind could dislodge me completely, and I’d lift off and blow away, like one of those seeds in a dandelion clock.”

The above quote is from the writer Gail Honeyman through the character Eleanor Oliphant in her debut novel Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine. When I read this part I lingered over the words for a few minutes, taking them all in. This is what I was trying to say when I wrote the words “I float through life like air“. This is exactly what I meant.

Both books are chock-full of quotes and experiences that echo my life, and I will definitely be going back to them for a while to come.

I will end this post with another quote from Eleanor:

“I took one of my hands in the other, tried to imagine what it would feel like if it was another person’s hand holding mine. There have been times where I felt that I might die of loneliness.”

Let’s go to the theatre dah-ling!

“Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

It was only in the theatre that I lived.
-Oscar Wilde.

Most weekends I am in my room, on my bed, watching television and eating pastry. Some weekends, even Netflix is not enough to assuage the hellish boredom so I say sod it, and head into town to see a play.

As a socially awkward teetotal introvert who doesn’t live close to any of her five friends, finding fun things to do can be daunting. One thing I love to do is to go see a play in one of London’s many theatres. So occasionally I make plans with a friend to meet up in the West End for dinner and a play, and I am rarely happier than during these times. Just being in the West End, surrounded by all the theatres with signs screaming the various plays. I inhale deeply-even the air is different (you would feel the same way if you spend most of your time alone in a small room). Over the years I have seen quite a few plays in London-mostly musicals, but also some drama. Here are my top five plays:

Hideous puppets

“But we never get back our youth. The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to. Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray