Hiyoshi, Kanagawa
December 2010
January 7, 2011
Dear Chona,
Probably you are unsafely back on Japanese ground now, finding ways to get through the darker days.
Maybe dreams of the coming year are helping. I hope so.
The drizzling clouds over here remind me of the gentle park breeze we had not so long ago. It feels like a life in itself. Everything is illuminated in the wake of nostalgia, like Tomas would say.
I have a little room, with a couch and window and I am slowly trotting on.
I hope you are doing very well.
Hug,
Tom
I only ask for someone to make me vehement.
My dear Molly,
I didn’t mean to make you think that I was against marriage. Of course, I’m not, though the extreme safeness and sobriety of young couples does apall me, but then so do the random melancholy old maids. I began life with a tremendous, absurd, ideal of marriage, then my bird’s eye view of many marriages disgusted me, and I thought I must be asking what was not to be had. But that has passed too. Now I only ask for someone to make me vehement, and then I’ll marry him! The fault of our society always seems to me to be timidity and self- consciousness; and I feel oddly vehement, and very exacting, and so difficult to live with and so very intemperate and changeable, now thinking one thing and another. But in my heart I always expect to be floated over all crises, when the moment comes, and landed heaven knows where!
Yrs.aff.
VS
—Virginia Woolf on Marriage
Bobby Long: I’ve seen him with a woman that he can’t get enough of. A woman that’s crawled into every molecule of his being. That consumed his every thought and turned him into a creature of devotion and obsession. I have the scars of that love on my face, have ya told her about that? Have you told her about the difference between true love and a warm bed to pass the time away? (A Love Song for Bobby Long, 2004)
First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
