90
PARTISAN REVIEW
April 30, 1847
I have never before been so conscious of how little talent
is
vouchsafed me for expressing ideas in words. You ask me for a
frank, clear explanation. But haven't I given you just that a hun–
dred times, and, if I may say so, in every letter for many months?
What can I say now that I have not said before?
You want to know whether I love you, so that everything can
be cleared up once and for all. Isn't that what you wrote me yes–
terday? It is too big a question to be answered by a "Yes" or a "No."
Still, I will try to do that, so that you will no longer accuse me of
being always evasive. I hope that today you'll at least be fair: you
don't spoil me in that regard.
For me, love is not and should not be in the foreground of life;
it should remain in the back room. Other things in the soul have
precedence over it; things which seem to me nearer the light, closer
to the sun. So, if you look upon love as the main dish of existence,
the answer is no.
As
a seasoning, yes.
If
you mean by "loving" to
be exclusively preoccupied with the loved one, to live only through
him, to see, of everything there is to see in the world, only him, to
be full of the idea of him, just as a little girl's apron is filled with
flowers that keep spilling out on all sides even though she holds
the corners in her mouth and squeezes it tightly with both hands–
to feel, in a word, that your life is tied to his life and that this tie
has become an integral organ of your soul-then: No.
If
you mean by loving the desire to take, from this contact of
two persons, the foam that floats on the surface, without stirring the
dregs that may be below; a union combining affection and pleasure;
meetings filled with delight and partings devoid of despair (even
when I kissed my best-beloved in their coffins I did not despair);
the ability to live without one another-since it is quite possible to
live severed from everything one desires, orphaned of all one's loves,
bereft of all one's dreams, while nevertheless smilingly relapsing into
moments of passion; in short, the feeling that this happened because
it had to happen and that it will end because everything ends with
no blame attached to either side, and the determination, as long as
this joy lasts, to go on living as before, or perhaps a little better than
before, with an additional resting place for your heart when it is
tired (not that this makes you feel any happier at facing the world
