I've come across a few items which I thought appropriate for the holiday dedicated to matters of the heart: Valentine's Day.
This week, Garrison Keillor in his "Writer's Almanac" is observing Valentine's Day with love letters from the literary world.
Earlier this week, the writer was Franz Kafka. Born in Prague (Ellen pay attention), Kafka is thought of as a neurotic, but as Keillor points out, he wrote a great many love letters to Felice Bauer, a Berlin woman to whom he was engaged for five years.
In the autumn of 1912, wrote to her:
"Fraulein Felice!
I am now going to ask you a favour which sounds quite crazy, and which I should regard as such, were I the one to receive the letter. It is also the very greatest test that even the kindest person could be put to. Well this is it:
Write to me only once a week, so that your letter arrives on Sunday — for I cannot endure your daily letters, I am incapable of enduring them.
For instance, I answer one of your letters, then lie in bed in apparent calm, but my heart beats through my entire body and is conscious only of you.
I belong to you; there is really no other way of expressing it, and that is not strong enough. But for this very reason I don't want to know what you are wearing; it confuses me so much that I cannot deal with life; and that's why I don't want to know that you are fond of me. If I did, how could I, fool that I am, go on sitting in my office, or here at home, instead of leaping onto a train with my eyes shut and opening them only when I am with you?"
And a week after that, he wrote to her:
"Dearest, what have I done that makes you torment me so? No letter again today, neither by the first mail nor the second. You do make me suffer! While one written word from you could make me happy! ... If I am to go on living at all, I cannot go on vainly waiting for news of you, as I have done these last few interminable days ...
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And then, I found another website for Valentine's Day which featured the best breakup songs. I don't know if this one's the best but it's way up there:
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Additional emotional love letters can be found in a movie I watched recently, "Bright Star," which features love letters written by John Keats to his great love and muse Fanny Brawne.
Sue and I saw "Bright Star" in the theater when it first came out. A.O.Scott of the New York Times concludes his review with this:
“Bright Star” is rated PG (parental guidance suggested). It is perfectly chaste and insanely sexy.
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