1919
Men tiliche,
I have been talking all the evening about paris- paris when we first arrived there- Knoblock's flat- O Mitya! It makes me drunk to remember it, and the hoard of days, weeks and months we had ahead of us.
I shall never forget the mad exhilaration of the nights I spend wandering about with Julian as long as I live! Even Monte Carlo was not better. As good, but not better. It makes my brain reel to remember! The night we went to the Palais Royal and the night we went to "La Femme et le Pantin" were the happiest in my life. I was simply drunk with happiness. We were just bohemians, Julian and I, with barely enough to pay for our dinner, free, without a care or a relation in the world. O god! I was happy! I thought it would never come to an end. I was madly, insatiably in love with you.
Julian was a poet without a penny: I was Julian's mistress. One day julian would write great poetry and make money- but, en attendant, we just had enough to live on. I worshipped Julian. The Paris of Francois Villon, Louise, La Boheme, Alfred de Musset, all jumbled up, lay at our feet: we were part of it, essentially.
As much part of it as the hairy concierge and the camelots who wear canvas shoes and race down the boulevards nasally screaming, "La Petue! La Presse!" and "La Femme et le Pantin." I lay back in an abandonment of happiness and gave myself up to your scandalously indiscreet caresses, in full view of the whole theater!
Not ladylike perhaps! But then I had never known what it was like to be a lady!
Then we drove back in the dark taxi, and the chauffeur smiled knowingly and sympatheticly at you. I'm sure he thought: "It's not often that they must pay this [taxi fare], poor kids..." Then the flat, the deserted, unutterably romantic Palais Royal, Julian's impatience, Julian's roughness, Julian's clumsy, fumbling hands.... My God! I can't bear to think of it!
Mitya... Mitya... How I adored you! Our life, our blessed bohemian life! It can't be at an end! It can't. It can't. I love you with a passion that only increases, never diminishes.
As Professor Ross said to me tonight, you are made for passion, your perfectly proportioned body, your heavy-lidded brooding eyes, your frankly sensual mouth and chin. you are made for it and so am I.
I said to Professor Ross that I thought you were one of the most moral people I knew. He spat with derision: "Pah! With that mouth, with that chin. With those antecedents! Tell me another!" (Professor Ross cheered me up considerably while he was here.)
My beautiful, My lovely, I want you so.
These are the best years of your life. Soon you will be thirty. Youngish, but no longer young, Then thirty-eight, forty, middle-aged.
What will you have to show for your lost youth, your fading beauty, no longer exurberant and magnetic, but hard and austere and expressionless? You who might have been, who might still be! one of the greatest figures of your century- A George Sand, Catherine of Russia, a Helen of Troy, Sappho!
Listen to my voice, Mitya, for once I'm not thinking only of us. All the sublime, the magnificent figures of history hold out their hands to you. Nature and youth and joy of living, all supremely for you- everybody even here in London, acknowledges and clamours for the outer manifestations of your tremendous potentialities. You're huge, Mitya, blindingly beautiful and gifted. The world is tiny, Mitya, the word is at your feet.
By the world, I mean the world of Art- the other world doesn't even count. You don't belong to the other world. You owe yourself to the world of art, the world of colour, of adventure, of enterprise, of hazard, of free love.
The other world doesn't matter a row of pins. Dozens of immaculate ordinary people will fulfill your functions in the ordinary everyday world. Nobody can take the place you would fill in the world of Art.
You know I am speaking the truth- Mitya. I want you for myself, but I want you also for history. I want you for Immortality.
I want you for history as a person who has written dazzlingly and lived dazzlingly.
" Come to us, we're waited so long for you.
We'll make life a wonderful song for you."
Cast aside the drab garments of respectability and convention, my beautiful Bird of Paradise, they become you not. Lead the life Nature intended you to lead. Otherwie, Mitya, You'll be a failure- you, who might be among the greatest, the most scintillating and romantic figures of all time, you'll be "Mrs. Nicolson, who has written some charming verse. She is daughter of the- ? Lord Sackville (forgive my ignorance), and often appears in charity matinees."
Men tiliche,
I have been talking all the evening about paris- paris when we first arrived there- Knoblock's flat- O Mitya! It makes me drunk to remember it, and the hoard of days, weeks and months we had ahead of us.
I shall never forget the mad exhilaration of the nights I spend wandering about with Julian as long as I live! Even Monte Carlo was not better. As good, but not better. It makes my brain reel to remember! The night we went to the Palais Royal and the night we went to "La Femme et le Pantin" were the happiest in my life. I was simply drunk with happiness. We were just bohemians, Julian and I, with barely enough to pay for our dinner, free, without a care or a relation in the world. O god! I was happy! I thought it would never come to an end. I was madly, insatiably in love with you.
Julian was a poet without a penny: I was Julian's mistress. One day julian would write great poetry and make money- but, en attendant, we just had enough to live on. I worshipped Julian. The Paris of Francois Villon, Louise, La Boheme, Alfred de Musset, all jumbled up, lay at our feet: we were part of it, essentially.
As much part of it as the hairy concierge and the camelots who wear canvas shoes and race down the boulevards nasally screaming, "La Petue! La Presse!" and "La Femme et le Pantin." I lay back in an abandonment of happiness and gave myself up to your scandalously indiscreet caresses, in full view of the whole theater!
Not ladylike perhaps! But then I had never known what it was like to be a lady!
Then we drove back in the dark taxi, and the chauffeur smiled knowingly and sympatheticly at you. I'm sure he thought: "It's not often that they must pay this [taxi fare], poor kids..." Then the flat, the deserted, unutterably romantic Palais Royal, Julian's impatience, Julian's roughness, Julian's clumsy, fumbling hands.... My God! I can't bear to think of it!
Mitya... Mitya... How I adored you! Our life, our blessed bohemian life! It can't be at an end! It can't. It can't. I love you with a passion that only increases, never diminishes.
As Professor Ross said to me tonight, you are made for passion, your perfectly proportioned body, your heavy-lidded brooding eyes, your frankly sensual mouth and chin. you are made for it and so am I.
I said to Professor Ross that I thought you were one of the most moral people I knew. He spat with derision: "Pah! With that mouth, with that chin. With those antecedents! Tell me another!" (Professor Ross cheered me up considerably while he was here.)
My beautiful, My lovely, I want you so.
These are the best years of your life. Soon you will be thirty. Youngish, but no longer young, Then thirty-eight, forty, middle-aged.
What will you have to show for your lost youth, your fading beauty, no longer exurberant and magnetic, but hard and austere and expressionless? You who might have been, who might still be! one of the greatest figures of your century- A George Sand, Catherine of Russia, a Helen of Troy, Sappho!
Listen to my voice, Mitya, for once I'm not thinking only of us. All the sublime, the magnificent figures of history hold out their hands to you. Nature and youth and joy of living, all supremely for you- everybody even here in London, acknowledges and clamours for the outer manifestations of your tremendous potentialities. You're huge, Mitya, blindingly beautiful and gifted. The world is tiny, Mitya, the word is at your feet.
By the world, I mean the world of Art- the other world doesn't even count. You don't belong to the other world. You owe yourself to the world of art, the world of colour, of adventure, of enterprise, of hazard, of free love.
The other world doesn't matter a row of pins. Dozens of immaculate ordinary people will fulfill your functions in the ordinary everyday world. Nobody can take the place you would fill in the world of Art.
You know I am speaking the truth- Mitya. I want you for myself, but I want you also for history. I want you for Immortality.
I want you for history as a person who has written dazzlingly and lived dazzlingly.
" Come to us, we're waited so long for you.
We'll make life a wonderful song for you."
Cast aside the drab garments of respectability and convention, my beautiful Bird of Paradise, they become you not. Lead the life Nature intended you to lead. Otherwie, Mitya, You'll be a failure- you, who might be among the greatest, the most scintillating and romantic figures of all time, you'll be "Mrs. Nicolson, who has written some charming verse. She is daughter of the- ? Lord Sackville (forgive my ignorance), and often appears in charity matinees."
هیچ نظری موجود نیست:
ارسال یک نظر