• a letter from “Letters of Vincent van Gogh” every single day
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• a letter from “Letters of Vincent van Gogh” every single day
• a letter from Vladimir Nabokov’s “Letters to Véra” on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, Sundays
• art recommendations every day of the week
• poetry recommendations every day of the week
• monthly book recommendations
• additional content related to art and literature
• access to all the previous posts (Franz Kafka’s “Letters to Milena”, “Letter to his Father”,  Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet”, poetry/art recs)

• a letter from Vladimir Nabokov’s “Letters to Véra” on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, Sundays
• poetry recommendations on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, Sundays
• art recommendations on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, Sundays
• access to all the previous posts (Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet”, poetry/art recs)

“That’s true and it’s unfair to laugh at the lead singer in the opera who sings an aria while lying on the stage, mortally wounded. We lie on the ground and sing for years.”

Marguerite Duras, from The Lover

“you are terrifying and strange and beautiful something not everyone knows how to love.”

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers.

Now that I’m free to be myself, who am I? / Can’t fly, can’t run, and see how slowly I walk. / Well, I think, I can read books.

”What’s that you’re doing?” the green-headed fly shouts as it buzzes past.

I close the book.

At lunchtime I bought a huge orange— The size of it made us all laugh. I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave— They got quarters and I had a half.

And that orange, it made me so happy, As ordinary things often do Just lately.

I want to write something so simply / about love / or about pain / that even / as you are reading / you feel it and as you read / you keep feeling it / and though it be my story it will be common, / though it be singular it will be known to you / so that by the end you will think— no, you will realize— / that it was all the while / yourself arranging the words, / that it was all the time / words that you yourself, / out of your own heart / had been saying.

But darkness holds it all: the shape and the flame, the animal and myself, how it holds them, all powers, all sight —

and it is possible: its great strength is breaking into my body. I have faith in the night.

He stood alone in my backyard, so dark the night purpled around him. I had no choice. I opened the door & stepped out. Wind in the branches. He watched me — his eyes kerosene blue. What do you want, I asked, forgetting I had no language. He kept breathing, to stay alive. But I was a boy then. Which meant I was a murderer of my childhood. & like all murderers, my god was stillness.

What’s Not to Love about a broken bowl, now two half-bowls,

still ready to hold what they can, even

if that’s nothing

to love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it / and everything you’ve held dear / crumbles like burnt paper in your hands, / your throat filled with the silt of it. When grief sits with you, its tropical heat / thickening the air, heavy as water / more fit for gills than lungs; / when grief weights you down like your own flesh / only more of it, an obesity of grief, 

you think, How can a body withstand this? Then you hold life like a face / between your palms, a plain face, / no charming smile, no violet eyes, / and you say, yes, I will take you I will love you, again.

I want to unfold.

Nowhere I wish to stay crooked, bent; / for there I would be dishonest, untrue.

I want my conscience to be / true before you; / want to describe myself like a / picture I observed / for a long time, one close up, / like a new word I learned and embraced, / like the everyday jug, / like my mother’s face, / like a ship that carried me along / through the deadliest storm.

How much can you change and get away with it, before you turn into something else, before it’s some kind of murder? Difficult to be confronted with the fact of yourself. Opaque in the sense of finally solid, in the sense of see me, not through me. The selves, glaze on glaze, accumulating their moods and minutes. We tremble and I paint the trembling. I enlarged his mouth and everything went blurry, a forgery. It might as well be. And all my fingers turned to twigs. Inside himself he jumped a little. Why build a room you can live in? Why build a shed for your fears? The life of a body is a nightmare.

Turn yourself inside out / and paint your organs the color of what you see / in your dreams.

This is the art of / living with a ticking heart, a grenade you / throw through windows to make a / point that language / has no room for.

This is how I destroyed you.

And this, is how I kept you alive.

What would a better me paint? There is no new me, there is no old me, there’s just me, the same me, the whole time. Vanity, vanity, forcing your will on the world. Don’t try to make a stronger wind, you’ll wear yourself out. Build a better sail. You want to solve something? Get out of your own way. What’s the difference between me and the world? Compartmentalization. The world doesn’t know what to do with my love. Because it isn’t used to being loved. It’s a framework problem. Disheartening? Obviously. I hope it’s love. I’m trying really hard to make it love.

It feels cruel. Something in me isn’t ready to let go of summer so easily. To destroy what I’ve carefully cultivated all these months. Those pale flowers might still have time to fruit.

The holes in this picture are not flowers, they are not wheels, and the phone is ringing ringing, a headache word, it’s ringing for you. This is in the second person. This is happening to you because I don’t want to be here. Is there anything I won’t put words around? Yes, there is.

And so there are gaps. And so naturally things try to get into the gaps. I imagine things because I like them or sometimes I dislike them and I am afraid of them and I live in an imaginary world. The phone is ringing and I don’t want to hear this. The T.V. is on and I don’t want to see this, I don’t want to rise to this occasion.

I stood the yard in my everyday clothes singing Wings little monster, listen to my soup bones. Does it help? What does this have to do with the airplanes and the buildings falling down?

Marguerite Duras, from The Lover