Letter LXVI

This, dearest, I say and say: and write down now lest you have forgotten
it. For your writing of it, and all the rest of you that I have, goes
with me to my grave. How superstitious we are of our own bodies after
death!--I, as if I believed that I should ever rise or open my ears to
any sound again! I do not, yet it comforts me to make sure that certain
things shall go with me to dissolution.

Truly, dearest, I believe grief is a great deceiver, and that no one
quite quite wishes not to exist. I have no belief in future existence;
yet I wish it so much--to exist again outside all this failure of my
life. For at present I have done you no good at all, only evil.

And I hope now and then, that writing thus to you I am not writing
altogether in vain. If I can see sufficiently at the last to say--Send
him these, it will be almost like living again: for surely you will love
me again when you see how much I have suffered,--and suffered because I
would not let thought of you go.

Could you dream, Beloved, reading this that there is bright sunlight
streaming over my paper as I write?