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Journalism of Courage
Kurt Vonnegut: With his signature wit, the American writer pens this letter to his soon-to-be wife, Jane, from the frontlines during World War 2: “Someone said that there are three kinds of lies: little white lies, big lies, and statistics. Here are a few statistics, built on the miserable fact that we have been together nine hours out of a little more than a year. / At that rate we have been together one hour out of every thousand hours — / One day out of every three years — / One month out of a lifetime, or about half that part of your life dedicated to brushing your teeth — / And were we to be together for what remains of our lives (our prewar birthright) we would have to be born in 50,000 BC, the Early Stone Age, when man first used fire and was learning to chip crude weapons from flint, before he moved into caves! // ALL OF THIS IS VERY SAD AND WILL DOUBTLESS BECOME MUCH WORSE”
Virginia Woolf: In this letter to fellow English writer Vita Sackville-West (both were married, by the way), the Mrs Dalloway author professes a smug getaway desire: “Look Here Vita — throw over your man, and we’ll go to Hampton Court and dine on the river together and walk in the garden in the moonlight and come home late and have a bottle of wine and get tipsy, and I’ll tell you all the things I have in my head, millions, myriads — They won’t stir by day, only by dark on the river. Think of that. Throw over your man, I say, and come.”
Jane Austen: In one of the novelist’s most famous climaxes, Persuasion’s protagonist Anne is slipped this letter by navy officer Wentworth after an anguished ‘will they-won’t they’ saga: “I can no longer listen in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me that I am not too late, that such precious feelings are gone forever. I offer myself to you with a heart even more your own than when you broke it almost eight years and a half ago.”
Franz Kafka: An excerpt from a letter written by the 20th century Prague-born writer, in a fit when he felt his beloved wasn’t reciprocating his love: “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?”
Julio Cortazar: The opening stanzas of a poem by the famed 20th century Latin American writer, simply titled ‘Love Letter’: “Everything I’d want from you / is finally so little // because finally it’s everything // like a dog going by, or a hill, / those meaningless things, mundane, / wheat ear and long hair and two lumps of sugar, / the smell of your body, / whatever you say about anything / with or against me, // all that which is so little / I want from you because I love you”
