LOVE LETTERS 💌
TACKY, ROMANTIC, OR JUST A DYING ART?
Today’s post is once again a little different, which is one of the reasons I called it the Change and Evolve Letter. It does give me some liberties. So bear with me.
I may have mentioned - on occasion - that I am a hopeless, or more accurately, hopeful romantic, and I stand by it. The inspiration for this post came from a love letter I stumbled over recently, and I just wanted to share it with you. Also, I felt the need to post something light and beautiful today.
„I believe the core of most of us women is very simple. We want to feel appreciated, acknowledged, and something as simple as flowers with a little note or some love letters goes a long way.“ — Yolanda Hadid
The art of writing love letters is unfortunately a dying art. With email, texting, and emojis replacing the handwritten word I believe that a lot of romance simply gets lost. Sometimes I think that I was born a few decades too late. Luckily I once received a love letter - not handwritten mind you (which was probably a good thing as I always struggled deciphering his handwriting) - that was so stunningly beautiful that most women would probably kill for it. Yet I will refrain from sharing this here. But here is a stunningly beautiful love letter that Gerald Durrell, a respected conservationist wrote to his future wife, Lee McGeorge, that I will gladly share…
July 31st, 1978
My darling McGeorge,
You said that things seemed clearer when they were written down. Well, herewith is a very boring letter in which I will try and put everything down so that you may read and re-read it in horror at your folly in getting involved with me. Deep breath.
To begin with I love you with a depth and passion that I have felt for no one else in this life and if it astonishes you it astonishes me as well. Not I hasten to say, because you are not worth loving. Far from it. It’s just that, first of all, I swore I would not get involved with another woman. Secondly, I have never had such a feeling before and it is almost frightening. Thirdly, I would never have thought it possible that another human being could occupy my waking (and sleeping) thoughts to the exclusion of almost everything else.
Fourthly, I never thought that — even if one was in love — one could get so completely besotted with another person, so that a minute away from them felt like a thousand years.
Fifthly, I never hoped, aspired, dreamed that one could find everything one wanted in a person. I was not such an idiot as to believe this was possible. Yet in you I have found everything I want: you are beautiful, gay, giving, gentle, idiotically and deliciously feminine, sexy, wonderfully intelligent and wonderfully silly as well. I want nothing else in this life than to be with you, to listen and watch you (your beautiful voice, your beauty), to argue with you, to laugh with you, to show you things and share things with you, to explore your magnificent mind, to explore your wonderful body, to help you, protect you, serve you, and bash you on the head when I think you are wrong… not to put too fine a point on it I consider that I am the only man outside mythology to have found the crock of gold at the rainbow’s end.
But — having said all that — let us consider things in detail. Don’t let this become public but… well, I have one or two faults. Minor ones, I hasten to say. For example, I am inclined to be overbearing. I do it for the best possible motives (all tyrants say that) but I do tend (without thinking) to tread people underfoot. You must tell me when I am doing it to you, my sweet, because it can be a very bad thing in a marriage.
Right. Second blemish. This, actually, is not so much a blemish of character as a blemish of circumstance. Darling I want you to be you in your own right, and I will do everything I can to help you in this. But you must take into consideration that I am also me in my own right and that I have a headstart on you… what I am trying to say is that you must not feel offended if you are sometimes treated simply as my wife. Always remember that what you lose on the swings, you gain on the roundabouts. But I am an established ‘creature’ in the world, and so — on occasions — you will have to live in my shadow. Nothing gives me less pleasure than this but it is a fact of life to be faced.
Third (and very important and nasty) blemish: jealousy. I don’t think you know what jealousy is (thank God) in the real sense of the word. I know you have felt jealousy over Lincoln’s wife and child but this is what I call normal jealousy, and this — to my regret — is not what I’ve got. What I have got is a black moster that can pervert my good sense, my good humour and any goodness that I have in my make-up. It is really a Jekyll and Hyde situation… my Hyde is stronger than my good sense and defeats me, hard though I try. As I told you, I have always known that this lurks within me, but I couldn’t control it, and my monster slumbered and nothing happened to awake it. Then I met you and I felt my monster stir and become half awake when you told me of Lincoln and others you have known, and with your letter my monster came out of its lair, black, irrational, bigoted, stupid, evil, malevolent. You will never know how terribly corrosive jealousy is; it is a physical pain as though you had swallowed acid or red hot coals. It is the most terrible of feelings. But you can’t help it — at least I can’t, and God knows I’ve tried. I don’t want any ex-boyfriends sitting in church when I marry you. On our wedding day, I want nothing but happiness, for both you and me, and I know I won’t be happy if there is a church full of your ex-conquests. When I marry you I will have no past, only a future: I don’t want to drag my past into our future and I don’t want you to do it , either. Remember I am jealous of you because I love you. You are never jealous of something you don’t care about. OK, enough about jealousy.
Now, let me tell you something… I have seen a thousand sunsets and sunrises, on land where it floods forest and mountains with honey-coloured light, at sea where it rises and sets like a blood orange in a multi-coloured nest of cloud, slipping in and out of the vast ocean. I have seen a thousand moons: harvest moons like gold coins, winter moons as white as ice chips, new moons like baby swans’ feathers.
I have seen seas as smooth as if painted, coloured like shot silk or blue as a kingfisher or transparent as glass or black and crumpled with foam, moving ponderously and murderously.
I have felt winds straight from the South Pole, bleak and wailing like a lost child; winds as tender and warm as a lover’s breath; winds that carried the astringent smell of salt and the death of seaweeds; winds that carried the moist rich smell of a forest floor, the smell of a million flowers. Fierce winds that churned and moved the sea like yeast, or winds that made the waters lap at the shore like a kitten.
I have known silence: the cold, earthy silence at the bottom of a newly dug well; the implacable stony silence of a deep cave; the hot, drugged midday silence when everything is hypnotized and stilled into silence by the eye of the sun; the silence when great music ends.
I have heard summer cicadas cry so that the sound seems stitched into your bones. I have heard tree frogs in an orchestration as complicated as Bach singing in a forest lit by a million emerald fireflies. I have heard the Keas calling over grey glaciers that groaned to themselves like old people as they inched their way to the sea. I have heard the hoarse street vendor cries of the mating Fur seals as they sang to their sleek golden wives, the crisp staccato admonishment of the Rattlesnake, the cobweb squeak of the Bat and the belling roar of the Red deer knee-deep in purple heather. I have heard Wolves baying at a winter’s moon, Red Howlers making the forest vibrate with their roaring cries. I have heard the squeak, purr and grunt of a hundred multi-coloured reef fishes.
I have seen hummingbirds flashing like opals round a tree of scarlet blooms, humming like a top. I have seen flying fish, skittering like quicksilver across the blue waves, drawing silver lines on the surface with their tails. I have seen Spoonbills flying home to roost like a scarlet banner across the sky. I have seen Whales, black as tar, cushioned on a cornflower blue sea, creating a Versailles of fountain with their breath. I have watched butterflies emerge and sit, trembling, while the sun irons their wings smooth. I have watched Tigers, like flames, mating in the long grass. I have been dive-bombed by an angry Raven, black and glossy as the Devil’s hoof. I have lain in water warm as milk, soft as silk, while around me played a host of Dolphins. I have met a thousand animals and seen a thousand wonderful things… but –
All this I did without you. This was my loss.
All this I want to do with you. This will be my gain.
All this I would gladly have forgone for the sake of one minute of your company, for your laugh, your voice, your eyes, hair, lips, body, and above all for your sweet, ever surprising mind which is an enchanting quarry in which it is my privilege to delve.
Perhaps a love letter is not your cup of tea, but I hope you find some joy in it, even if only as a distraction from all the madness surrounding us. If you have someone you truly love, why not send them a handwritten love letter for a change to show them you care? It doesn’t have to be as long as the one I shared today.
🎶My Song for you
Is one of my favourite love songs - Someone Like You by Van Morrison. Enjoy!
For more good music, go to this Spotify playlist where you can find all the songs from the Change & Evolve Letters!
📚My Poem for you
Is a beautiful love poem by the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore (1881–1944)
Unending Love
I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times… In life after life, in age after age, forever. My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs, That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms, In life after life, in age after age, forever. Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, its age-old pain, Its ancient tale of being apart or together. As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge, Clad in the light of a pole-star piercing the darkness of time: You become an image of what is remembered forever. You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount. At the heart of time, love of one for another. We have played along side millions of lovers, shared in the same Shy sweetness of meeting, the same distressful tears of farewell- Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever. Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you The love of all man’s days both past and forever: Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life. The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours – And the songs of every poet past and forever.
👀Impression
Is one of my most precious books… Love Is Enough…
Have you ever written or received a love letter? Is it tacky and outdated or romantic?
Let me know your thoughts in the comments, leave a ❤️ or send me a message. I always love hearing from you.
Wishing you a day filled with love wherever you are.
Yours
Tanja 🤗
Change & Evolve and feel free to get in touch
Brilliant stuff, though I'd like to humbly point out a couple of mistakes:
1. He appeats to want to mansplain things to her, which is no longer acceptable.
2. He also appears to be practicing for another book about animals at one stage, though maybe that's ok for Gerald Durrell.
Otherwise a great effort!
What a wonderful post Tanja. Gerald Durrell (and in fact the whole Durrell family) is so interesting. I wonder how you came across this beautiful letter to Lee McGeorge? I imagine that even if one had the writing skills of Durrell, have sufficient reflective time to sit down and write today, seems unlikely. Electronic messages will never have the same power as the written word. Increasingly though, young ones seem to have lost any written skills but they are very good with keyboards. Your post is an encouragement not to lose the old arts and to take time to write words of love and affirmation.
Your post reminded me that there was an interesting series called The Durrells - I haven't seen it but I think it was on Netflix. Here is a link about it in case you haven't seen it: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5014882/