BRACERS Record Detail for 17357
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"Tuesday night My Dearest Life—On reflection I saw no reason after all why I shouldn't write to you tonight—and I feel so full of things I want to write."
BR TO OTTOLINE MORRELL, [28 NOV. 1911]
BRACERS 17357. ALS. Morrell papers #270, Texas
Proofread by K. Blackwell et al.
34 Russell Chambers.1, 2
Tuesday night.
My Dearest Life
On reflection I saw no reason after all why I shouldn’t write to you tonight — and I feel so full of things I want to write. In spite of your being so tired it has been a very wonderful day. My Beloved, my love grows more and more infinite. — I feel there can be nothing for me of value in life except what comes through our love. It grows more passionate, more profound, more religious — and I have still the feeling I had at the beginning that it is greater than anything else in my life and that I would sacrifice everything else — even work — to it without any sense of wrong-doing — it brings its own justification from a region beyond calculation. You stir in me strange yearnings — partly for the joy of belief, which I must not hope for; partly (what is connected) for a more complete union with you — I don’t mean outwardly, tho’ that at times I feel overpoweringly, but inwardly — I wish we were united over religion, not only in feeling but in belief. More than 20 years ago, with infinite slow pain, I put away God — now you revive the old pain, and it is greater because of all the accumulated experience of sorrow which would be transformed by him. Your bird that you gave to Mother Julian, your Mantegna, and your prayers — I can’t tell you how profoundly I feel them — it is like the ghost of a dead friend speaking poignant words and then vanishing into the night. Then in imagination I beat myself against your inner sanctuary, and I see that I can never enter there — and that what is worse, your belief only survives because you do not believe in reason. That is the serious division, not God, who is a mere symptom. When I say you don’t believe in reason, I mean that passionate feeling seems to you a ground for belief, which exempts one from further minute examination. When I am with you I am not conscious of antagonism, I am only conscious of intense endeavour to find ways of meeting on fundamental things without being false to my creed. My view is that passionate feeling is often a sufficient ground for judging things good or bad, but not for judging that they exist.
Dearest Love, I must go to bed. — You know the passion of my love, and the passion of my feelings about religion — where they meet, it is rather terrific. But now I am dropping with sleep and hardly know what I am writing. Tomorrow morning, Darling. I love you, I love you, I love you, my Life and my soul.
Your
B.
