BRACERS Record Detail for 17935
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"Sat. aft." "I suppose nothing except music is quite so remote and abstract as the sort of work I do."
"Yesterday I finished Part II, and reached page 350."*
Presides on a discussion on memory tonight.
Wants to read her parts of Theory of Knowledge.
*The end of the ms, and of what he wrote of the book.
BR TO OTTOLINE MORRELL, [7 JUNE 1913]
BRACERS 17935. ALS. Morrell papers #799, Texas
Proofread by K. Blackwell et al.
Russell Chambers.1, 2
Sat. aftn.
My Darling Love
Your letter this morning was so dear — all your letters are — I feel I have been horrid lately, but I can’t help it — I am getting nicer now, I hope! I will be quite nice by the time you get home, if you ever do. I too have felt we should never meet again. But of course we shall, and have many happy times. Being here, where the place is full of you and I am away from the apparatus of work, makes it easier to believe we shall meet again. This morning looking at my books I felt a faint stirring of interest in poetry again — all this time every serious interest except work has been utterly dead. I have felt the “real” world — people and trees and birds and politics and everything — somewhere far off down some long dim corridor — when people spoke to me, only some half-automatic part answered them. But all the time there was a dumb underground emotional life going on — hungry loneliness, and a rebellion against the tyranny of such an isolating absorption. The absorption grows gradually less and the rebellion gradually greater — at last rebellion grows stronger and comes to the surface and I am human again. When it does come to the top it is terribly imperious. I know all this is trying for you, but one has to let one’s impulses have free play when they want to produce.
I suppose nothing except music is quite so remote and abstract as the sort of work I do. And music does not make human emotions look absurd. The habit of generalizing, of seeing everything with the warmth of the personal centre left out, makes people seem queer ridiculous automata — pieces of mechanism, with a ridiculous notion of their own importance plastered on. Abstractness is very different from sympathy — sympathy puts one inside other people’s centres, abstractness puts one outside all centres. One needs sympathy to get the facts, but abstractness to understand them.
Yesterday I finished Part II, and reached page 350. I should like to finish Part III before you come home, but it is on subjects I haven’t thought much about, so it will have to be sketchy. What I wrote on Memory yesterday will come in handy tonight, as I have to preside at a discussion on Memory.3
I am so glad Vittoz was pleased with you. Yes, you are quite right, I am sure, to do your utmost to get the habit of the exercises now.
I wonder whether some day when your head is very well you could read (or let me read) parts of what I have been writing. I feel that apart from me it wouldn’t interest you, but if you could take an interest in it, I shouldn’t suffer from the loneliness of it so much, or feel so much that I have to shut out the thought of you in order to do it. Why I think it might not interest you is that the motive is purely intellectual — it has no aim except to disentangle and set forth clearly a lot of complicated facts. If one hasn’t thought about the complications and been worried by them, the point of it all is not very obvious. Still, if you could, it would make a very important difference.
I am beginning to have a consuming longing for you — with a great dread, which I always have after an absence, for fear of things going wrong, or of my hurting you, as I generally do when I get excited. But today I don’t feel the dread — I think it will all go smoothly, and that we shall be absolutely together in spirit at once — I do hope you will be able to be interested in what I have done. But I am afraid it is hardly possible —
Now I must go to the philosophers. Darling Love I long for you and love you with all my soul and strength.
Your
B
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[document] Document 000799. Proofread against a colour scan of the original.
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[envelope] A circled “799”. The Lady Ottoline Morrell | 3 Avenue Agassiz | Lausanne | Switzerland. Pmk: LONDON. W | JUN 7 13B | 4.15 PM
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I have to preside at a discussion on Memory BR chaired an Aristotelian symposium on “Memory and Consciousness” on 7 June. See Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, n.s. 13 (1912–13): 365.