BRACERS Record Detail for 17086
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Mrs. [Whitehead]'s attitude: not to worry over complications at Studland.
On his childhood — sense of past, grandmother [Lady John Russell].
BR TO OTTOLINE MORRELL, [10 APR. 1911]
BRACERS 17086. ALS. Morrell papers #26, Texas
Proofread by K. Blackwell and A.G. Bone
My Dearest Ottoline
I must not write much as it is late and I am tired. I forgot to say Mrs W. seemed to have made up her mind that it was no use worrying over complications. She enumerated certain of my friends who will be at Studland, and I know of others — but she thought there was no point in not being in the house. (I didn’t suggest this.)
I am beginning to feel the strain of all the agitations we have been through, and it takes the form of bringing out the instinctive pessimism which is the background of all my feelings. No happiness hitherto has overcome this — I think perhaps you will, in time, but not at once. My natural view is that all human happiness is a mere interlude, and that sorrow is the normal lot of man. I see the ages as a weary march towards an imaginary goal, only reaching rest when the earth grows uninhabitable and thought is ended. I don’t think that is quite a true picture, but it is the picture I can’t get rid of. The greater part of my childhood I was alone, in a place where all the life was in the past. The garden was neglected — big trees lay where they fell and slowly decayed, the bushes chokeda the paths, and where flowers should have been there was nothing but overgrown box hedges. My grandmother, who brought me up, had endured one tragedy after another, and lived wholly in the past. She would call me by mistake the names of people who were dead. When I was still quite a child I got to know of things that were never told me, simply from watching her face and noticing things that pained her. All these things made me feel that the past is more important than the present, and I got the habit of thinking of present things as they would become when they were past. Then I have a restless brain which will keep on thinking however much I might wish to stop, and that produces a weariness of all thought. This is so much a part of my instincts that I don’t know if it will ever quite change. But I know that your power in that way is extraordinary with me — if I were with you always it would disappear altogether, and as it is it will grow less and less.
Dearest, I don’t know why I should ever write to you of things that are not wholly happy — when I am with you, it is such perfect and absolute joy that I forget I have ever felt anything else — I seem to be full of myself in all my letters to you — it is shameful. But I have such an impulse to talk of everything with you, and only happy things seem real when I am with you. I have a feeling that I can’t tell you how much your love really means to me, unless I tell you what I was without it. The burden of the world has often been heavy upon me, but with your love to give me joy I shall find every burden light. I am not speaking of private things, but of human life in general — all the strife and cruelty and oppression, all the pain and illness and misery that most people have to endure. I have often envied the ascetics who imagined they did their part by renouncing everything. But that is really no good. Do you know John Woolman’s Journal? That is really the way to live for those who can, but I have not enough simplicity. I need a more complicated salvation. Dearest, I feel in your love everything that helps my best, and I reverence you for it and for all you are, with all my soul. Goodnight, my very dearest.
B.
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[document] Document 000026. Proofread against a colour scan of the original.
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[envelope] A circled “26”. The Lady Ottoline Morrell | Cliff End | Studland | Dorset. Pmk: MIDHURST | 8.30.PM | AP 12 | 11 | ?. On the verso: WAREHAM | 9.45AM | AP 13 | 11
Textual Notes
- achoked Corrected from “choaked”. The O.E.D. does not recognize this spelling, and Merriam-Webster regards it as obsolete. BR used the orthodox spelling in an almost identical context a year later, in “The Perplexities of John Forstice” (1912): “… in the garden the paths were overgrown with weeds, unclipped box hedges choked the roses, and old trees lay rotting where the winter storms had uprooted them” (9 in Papers 12, p. 145). Cf. Auto. 1: 19.