The Thirteenth Tale

I'm kind of obsessed with Diane Setterfield's The Thirteenth Tale lately and keep rereading one particular passage over and over:

"How long did I sit on the stairs after reading the letter? I don't know. For I was spellbound. There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic. When I at last work up to myself, I could only guess what had been going on in the darkness of my unconscious. What had the letter done to me?"

Pen & Ink

"Elegy for the Personal Letter"

I miss the rumpled corners of correspondence,
the ink blots and crossouts that show
someone lives on the other end, a person
whose hands make errors, leave traces.
I miss fine stationary, its raised elegant
lettering prominent on creamy shades of ivory
or pearl grey. I even miss hasty notes
dashed off on notebook paper, edges
ragged as their scribbled messages—
can't much write now—thinking of you.
When letters come now, they are formatted
by some distant computer, addressed
to Occupant or To the family living at—
meager greetings at best,
salutations made by committee.
Among the glossy catalogs
and one time only offers
the bills and invoices,
letters arrive so rarely now that I drop
all other mail to the floor when
an envelope arrives and the handwriting
is actual handwriting, the return address
somewhere I can locate on any map.
So seldom is it that letters come
That I stop everything else
to identify the scrawl that has come this far—
the twist and the whirl of the letters,
the loops of the numerals. I open
those envelopes first, forgetting
the claim of any other mail,
hoping for news I could not read
in any other way but this.
~Allison Joseph

When I read this poem on The Writer's Almanac this morning, I couldn't believe how fitting it was. Lately, I've been getting back in touch with people via handwritten letter and I thrill at the whole process--staring at your thoughts in ink on a page, sealing them up in a tidy envelope and shipping them across the country or across the ocean, and then racing home every day to check the mail for a reply. Allison Joseph's poem captures the magic in letters, "the twist and the whirl of the letters, the loops of the numerals." Receiving a handwritten letter satisfies something in me that can't be met any other way.

Anais Nin

Words from the birthday girl:

"How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself."

"Do not seek the because--in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions."

"A leaf fluttered in through the window this morning, as if supported by the rays of the sun, a bird settled on the fire escape, joy in the task of coffee, joy accompanied me as I walked."

"Each friend represents a world in us, a world not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."

"Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death."

"Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish it's source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings."

"Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together."

"There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do."

"Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back; a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country."

"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."

"Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together."

Today was Virginia Woolf's birthday.

1902

"I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past."

~"A Sketch of the Past," 1939

The History of Love by Nicole Krauss

"I stood by the phone while my stomach turned itself inside out. During the time I waited, a whole species of butterfly may have become extinct, or a large, complex animal with feelings like mine."

What I Wish I Had Written

I am going start a collection of words I wish I'd written. While I am in awe of so many writers, sometimes a sentence hits you and you just can't let it go.

Here's one for today:

"She laid the side of her face against his frail old heart, where the pink shell of her ear could capture whatever song it had left."