14/05/2014 02:56
Dear Henry,
{…}
“You destroy and you suffer… I often see how you sob over what you destroy, how you want to stop and just worship; and you do stop, and then a moment later you are at it again with a knife, like a surgeon.
In some strange way I am not with you, I am against you. We are destined to hold two truths. I love you and I fight you.
And you, the same. We will be stronger for it, each of us, stronger with our love and our hate.
When you caricature and nail down and tear apart, I hate you. I want to answer you, not with weak or stupid poetry but with a wonder as strong as your reality. I want to fight your surgical knife with all the occult and magical forces of the world.
I want to both combat you and submit to you, because as a woman I adore your courage, I adore the pain it engenders, I adore the struggle you carry in yourself, which I alone fully realize, I adore your terrifying sincerity. I adore your strength.
You are right. The world is to be caricatured, but I know, too, how much you can love what you caricature. How much passion there is in you! It is that I feel in you. I do not feel the savant, the revealer, the observer. When I am with you, it is the blood I sense.
{…}
Henry writes back:
“Anaïs, I don’t know how to tell you what I feel. I live in perpetual expectancy. You come and the time slips away in a dream. It is only when you go that I realize completely your presence. And then it is too late.
You numb me. {…} This is a little drunken, Anaïs. I am saying to myself ‘here is the first woman with whom I can be absolutely sincere.’ I remember your saying – ‘you could fool me, I wouldn’t know it.’ When I walk along the boulevards and think of that. I can’t fool you—and yet I would like to.
I mean that I can never be absolutely loyal—it’s not in me. I love women, or life, too much—which it is, I don’t know. But laugh, Anaïs, I love to hear you laugh. You are the only woman who has a sense of gaiety, a wise tolerance—no more, you seem to urge me to betray you. I love you for that. {…}
I don’t know what to expect of you, but it is something in the way of a miracle. I am going to demand everything of you—even the impossible, because you encourage it. You are really strong. I even like your deceit, your treachery. It seems aristocratic to me.”
