Henry:
I did not mean to burn you yesterday—I was lying as in a dream—and so dissolved I could not hear you rising—I clung to a prolongation of that moment. When I think of it now I feel a kind of pain to have burned you—say that you forgive me—it was unconscious.
I can’t write to you, Henry, though I was awake last night telling you—all night—of that man I discovered yesterday … the man I sensed with my feelings the first moment—all the mountains of words, writings, quotations have sundered—I only know now the splendor, the blinding splendor of your room—and that unreal moment—how can a moment be at once so unreal and so warm—so warm.
There is so much you want to know. I remember your phrase: “Only whores appreciate me.” I wanted to say: you can only have blood-consciousness with whores, there is too much mind between us, too much literature, too much illusion—but then you denied there had been only mind…
My face makes you think that all my expectations go up, up … but you know now that it is not only my mind which is aware of you.
Aware of you, chaotically. I love this strange, treacherous softness of you which always turns to hatred. How did I single you out? I saw you with that intense selective way—I saw a mouth that was at once intelligent, animal, and soft … a strange mixture—a human man, sensitively aware of everything—I love awareness—a man, I told you, whom life made drunk. Your laughter was not a laughter which could hurt, it was mellow and rich. I felt warm, dizzy, and I sang within myself. You always said the truest and deepest things—slowly—and you have a way of saying, like a southerner—hem, hem—trailingly, while off on your own introspective journey—which touched me.
Just before that I had sought, as I told you, suicide. But I waited to meet you, as if that would solve something—and it did. When I saw you I thought, here is a man I could love. And I was no longer afraid of feelings. I couldn’t go through with the suicide (idea of killing off romanticism), something held me back. I can only move wholly.
(…) Henry, I too want to sit and write you a long time, as if it represented a closeness to you. I didn’t tell you the joy I felt at your return from Dijon, what a joy, acute, I feel when you act spontaneously as I do. And what a joy again when, in the center of the madness, you say unexpectedly something very deep, the sudden illuminations of living, the lantern never quite blown out—I love that too. Dark living and that awareness—I appreciate that—don’t you understand—like an intensification of all pleasures. I love the creator in you, too—who enriches and expands living in ways nobody else understands. I love the sincere and the insincere (I was delighted when you wrote me once and in the middle of the letter became aware it would make a preface!).
On se penetre non par les sensations mais par la pensée, I wonder.
(Source: neverneverland)
