go seduce Frederick

So as to not surprise you overly with the contents herein, I declare at the outset that this is a love letter. I profess my love for you, and will do so in greater detail below.

They tell me that the purpose of all writing, even of a love letter, is to convey information. They also say that the effective way to do it is to be brief and consistent: to write as though your words are being read aloud in the ear of your reader, who does not have much time or inclination to hear you our. Credit to those people that have made these claims: I have seen the method to work. If a small dictionary of short, sharp words was good enough for Faulkner, it shall be sufficient for me. If Hemingway cut off the heads of his sentences for being too tall, I shall do the same and profit the same. All this massacre, this wrangling and maiming of my emotions from their natural expression into this denuded form, would be justified if this letter were to speak into your ear and you were to hear, but honestly hear, the smallest fragment of how and what I feel for you.

I fear I'm not succeeding very well; prefatory remarks and caveats always feel necessary to a coward, and so I am a coward, for I cannot pare them down past this.

The first time I looked upon you, I saw beauty and good humour. These intuitions bore out further than I expected when we spoke. You may ask how beauty is an intuition: and I say that I have found the mysteries and difficulties of the visual form to be the most overlooked, because everybody thinks they understand them already. Close inspection will always reveal more, and taste in these subtleties can be developed. You have been an inspiration and subject in my experiments with these discoveries. Humour, of course, is more interactive, and my interactions with you have carried that same experimental quality; I fear you have acquitted yourself far better than I in our crossings. Let us call it what it is: I have an abominable stutter that grows far worse around you, and your kindness in keeping up the conversation in the face of this damnable impediment has endeared you to me as much as your conversation itself.

We have not been speaking idle pleasantries this whole time. You are aware of my ambitions, and you respect them. I do not know if you admire them or wish to pursue them in turn. I am aware that there are many things about it that might put one off the idea. I cannot change my own choice in the matter, and do not wish to impose my will upon someone I would leave unchanged from their present, perfect state. I will ask, in person, another time, and receive my rejection in an uncowardly manner. However, I love you. This is incontrovertible, and I wished you to know it - and to learn of it in a different breath than the one in which you were asked to consider or decide the shape of your own life. I feel strongly, though I know myself to be irresolute and weak in action; this seems to reflct my priorities, which are always to see and feel and touch a thing before ever considering doing anything about it -

Undisciplined lout though I am, I feel. You have always heard me out with your whole mind, or enough of it at any rate to take my points when I make them. I do not know why I feel you must know this - that I love you - and I am writing this letter precisely against the possibility that it might come to nothing - so that the acknowledgment of it might happen regardless of outcome; so I will without loss of internal vigilance posit that I have no ulterior motives of swaying your choices -

Ah, damn. My approach to editing leaves something to be desired. I cannot copy this out again or I will not send it. You will have to put up with my rambling. I do want to sway your choices. I want to to tell me, if you do not love me, to go to hell when I ask you if you will marry me. My fear is the reverse of what I thought it was: I think you're so ready to go haring off on an adventure that you'll come with me for that alone. In which case, I beg you: go find my distant acquaintance Frederick (yes, that Frederick, the one I hate) and seduce him. It won't be hard, he has taste; and he's an honourable, gentlemanly sort of chap; and won't look at a woman of worth and see nothing but a flower for a dining table vase.

If you do not love me, go have adventures another way, and let me hate you bitterly for a little while while you're doing it. We will be friends again, and it will be better than being slowly pickled in irony by your side as you tolerate me and I long for you.

I am unspeakably grateful that you tolerate me, and I love you for it. If that is all you are doing, I would prefer to love you from the distance we are at now, and no nearer.

This has been a rather irascible confession, hasn't it? I didn't set out to bite your head off. I suppose it's rather mortifyingly clear that I didn't set out to end up where I've ended up at all. I must send it off and hope -

Well, that you take my meaning. You always do.

Yours, Pat