Title: Letters of Note: Love
Compiled by Shaun Usher
Publisher: Canongate Books
ISBN: 9781786895325
Genre: Compilation, Letters
Pages: 144
Source: Publisher
Rating: 4
I was sixteen. He was twenty-five. It was the first time I wrote a love-letter and sent it to someone. I never got a reply. But I continued writing and sending love-letters to various men after that. I think this happened till the Internet took over my life, but that’s not the point I am trying to make here. What I’m saying is that there was a different kind of charm when it came to those letters – I am not romanticizing it one bit, but I guess in retrospect even the scratching and cutting out of phrases and sometimes being candid enough to tell all you felt for the person made you want to not send the letter. You get the drift
About ten days ago, I finished reading “Letters of Note: Love” – compiled by Shaun Usher and all I wanted to do was to reread those thirty letters all over again. Each of these letters is painfully beautiful and expresses love the manner in which I always fall short of words.
From Rilke’s lover expressing her love to him after he died to Steinbeck’s letter to his son speaking about love and heartbreak, to even my personal favorite – one from Vita Sackville-West to Woolf, each of these letters definitely talk of love, but in the most gracious and heartfelt manner.
I don’t know how they did it back in the day when letters used to be written, but they sure knew how to make words seem extraordinary. Whether it is Nabokov writing to his wife, or Johnny Cash to June Carter, each letter is unique, each expressing love in a different manner. No two letters are similar. The language of love and of the heart remains the same.
If you enjoy this (which I am sure you will), do check out Letters of Note, and More Letters of Note – both compiled by Shaun Usher.
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