My dear friend, what is this our life? A boat that swims in the sea, and all one

knows for certain about it is that one day it will capsize. Here we are,

two good old boats that have been faithful neighbors, and above all

your hand has done its best to keep me from ‘capsizing’! Let us then

continue our voyage—each for the other's sake, for a long time yet, a

long time! We should miss each other so much! Tolerably calm seas

and good winds and above all sun—what I wish for myself, I wish for

you, too, and am sorry that my gratitude can find expression only in

such a wish and has no influence at all on wind or weather.

Friedrich Nietzsche. Letter to Franz Overbeck, Genoa, 14 November 1881

 

The man who wrote this letter is not the Friedrich

Nietzsche I first met through my father’s words when I

was a young woman. This Nietzsche, the philosopher and

creative thinker, the ‘genius’ and man of unfathomable

ideas, was then beyond my reach. He had the power to

intimidate me even before I had read any of his writings,

simply because my father thought Nietzsche would be good

for me. But today when I read this letter I am left with

a different view of the man and can see now how much I

may have misjudged him. Letters give us an opportunity to

revisit old places and states of mind.

Nietzsche and his contemporaries wrote many and

often long letters. In those days, during the 19th

century, it was the principal method of communication

when unable to speak in person. These days, letter

writing is considered a dying art, replaced by emails and

text messages that are typically short and to the point.

Still, I prefer the written letter.

Letters

We have a long history of letter writing in my family.

What you cannot say face to face you put into a letter,

in the knowledge that at least it will, in all

likelihood, be read if not understood. Even when we, the

various members of my family, live two suburbs away from

one another, there are times when a letter feels safer

than a phone call, an email or a face-to-face

conversation. It is one way of skipping over potential

conflict.

There are also the letters that never reached their

destination. Letters I once wrote in passion, but chose

never to send. These are the letters I have archived in

dark cabinets, an aid to memory and no more. The unsent

letter is the letter we write in a space in between

thinking and speaking. We write to unburden ourselves. We

write freely in the knowledge that the person supposedly

on the receiving end of this letter will never get to

read it, and therefore we are safe from the retaliation

or distress that might follow. Some destroy their

versions of these letters, but I collect mine. They

become evidence of states of mind that I have long since

forgotten. They help me to remember.

In the early 1960s The Age had a special section, and

children from all over Victoria were invited to submit

their work. I sent off letters to the editor, along with

poem after poem, in the hope that, one day, one of my

poems might appear in print. It never happened. Instead,

I received a series of A5-sized certificates of merit in

red print on a cream background. I understood that if I

collected enough of these certificates I might one day

receive a prize: money or publication. I did not always

receive a certificate in response to my poetry. Often I

sent a batch of poems. Sometimes I received a batch of

certificates, but it was entirely unpredictable as to

whether or not I would receive a certificate, or how

many.

This was my first foray into the world of publication, or

of non-publication as it turned out then. I liken these

attempts to letter writing: to my efforts to find an

audience; my efforts to find a voice; my efforts to be

heard. I still have the certificates, yellowed now, in a

large, torn envelope. I look at them from time to time

and wonder at the child I once was, her ambitions and her

romanticism.

I also use letters to help me to recover the past.

In so doing I try to remain faithful to my memory, but it

is a fickle faithfulness. Beneath my writing desk I have

a trunk full of letters, including one I wrote to myself

in 1970. I had sealed the letter in an envelope addressed

to me, to be read three years hence, when I would turn

21.

‘Please excuse the paper and the cramped writing,’ my 18-

year-old self wrote. ‘Did you get into university? If you

didn’t I hate to rake up bad memories. Is life terribly

painful? Any major disasters?’ I asked my future self

question upon question. ‘So far life seems pretty

complicated but the complications, the ups and downs and

all the dreams make life interesting. Are you still a

dreamer? I don’t suppose three years could change you

that much.’

Until now I have kept the letter to myself. My smug

goody-two-shoes 18-year-old self appals me. She may not

seem smug to you, my 18-year-old self, not from what you

have read of her letter so far, but I base my judgments

on my memory of her. I judge her as I remember her, and

not perhaps as she was. I judge her from the inside, but

my letter compounds my judgment.  

Paul John Eakin writes about the notion of memory

traces, such as this letter. They are like the bone the

dog buries to retrieve later, and become examples of what

Andre Aciman has described as ‘remembering remembering’

(cited Eakin 2008: 165). I remember the evening I wrote

the letter, seated at the laminated kitchen table, the

radio in the background playing Frank Sinatra. And I

remember that even as I was writing this letter I was

deluding myself. I was not doing it ‘my way’. I was 18

years old, and on the brink of my career in social work

and psychology. But I was also deeply troubled, and

anxious about what might happen next.

Was I defending my self against my helplessness? My

mother had decided that we should all return home, she,

my siblings and I, after a year of living separately from

our father. I did not want to go back to live with my

drunk and abusive father, no matter how many miracles my

mother was convinced had occurred, but I was powerless. I

had no say in the matter.

Avishai Magarlit believes that ‘art is born of

humiliation’, in that ‘we remember insults better than we

remember pain’, and it is the memory of these experiences

of humiliation that are reconfigured, reconstructed in

memory, as he observes, ‘between the cold contemplation

of past emotion and the hot reliving of it’ (Margalit

2003: 120). This letter becomes my object of memory, a

trace of my 18-year-old self that I remember remembering,

a type of ‘conscious marking’ (Eakin 2008: 70). It is

full of cliché and grandiosity, and is evidence of my

young self’s attempts to speak severely to some future

self—almost a bid to dictate the future.

I have a memory of trying to be honest with myself,

trying to write my way out of any sense of abjection. And

I have another memory of my disappointment in my 18-year-

old self when I first opened the letter as a 21-year-old.

How could I ever have been such a priss? But the letter

is an accurate memory trace and I must honour its

existence, however much I might want to re-write my own

history.

There are many approaches to the study of memory—

from the literary to the physiological, from the

psychological and individual to the collective and

sociological, from the normative to the pathological as

in trauma—and each perspective offers a different view on

memory, too wide to consider here. There are also

multiple perspectives on the nature of creativity, but to

me its essence lies in our willingness to try and try

again. Similarly, Drusilla Modkeska refers to the artist

Grace Cossington Smith’s notion of a continual try:

It’s true of painting, it’s true of writing, and

it’s true of life. The process of staying with that

continual try can produce long low loops and sudden

illuminations, which we see in retrospect as springing

open and banging closed. But in the tug and pull of time

it is another day lived, another piece of board on the

easel, another squeeze from the tube (Modjeska 1999:

322).

And so it is when I write letters and go back to my

childhood memories. I can try again, knowing that each

time I remember, my recollection shifts. As I record the

images from my memory—the table, the house, the radio of

my 18-year-old writing self—they seem clear to me. But

then I come to a block, to details I cannot fill in.

Everything that happened in my childhood memory happened

in the summer or the winter. Of course, that could not

be. Where were the springs and autumns, the in between

times when life like the weather took on a balanced

aspect, not too hot, not too cold? They disappeared

between the extremes. I begin to make things up, to make

calculated guesses. I create a narrative. I condense and

concertina events. I wrote the letter at Christmas time,

it must have been summer. It was probably hot. I would

have been wearing a tee shirt, but I cannot remember.

To write too often that I do not remember is to

distract my reader and do damage to my narrative. But

still I must be faithful to my memory. I try to reach the

emotional truth of past experience. Such emotional

experience is faithful to memory and, when memory fails,

as the memoir writer Nancy Miller writes, ‘I let language

lead. The words take me where I need to go’ (Miller 2004:

150). It is a future reading of an act rather than simply

a leap into the past. In the end I am not so much

faithful to my memory as faithful to my recollected

emotional experience and to my construction of narrative.

To tell a story, I need an audience—hence the letter, the

many letters I write, and even the letters I write to

myself. As Franz Kafka suggests, letter writing is ‘an

intercourse with ghosts’: not only, he argues, with the

recipient, but with oneself, the letter writer (Kafka

1990: ix). I write letters to recreate reality. I write

letters to write. And when, as Eakin notes, the bond to

parents is troubled, and there is ‘unfinished business’,

I write letters to repair (Eakin 1999: 87).

Lived experience

Towards the end of the summer of my eighteenth year, I

was the only one from my matriculation class at the

University of Melbourne. In Orientation Week I went to

the Catholic Students’ Youth Camp at Mt Evelyn. I wore my

new white jeans. I was fat, but at least the jeans made

me look like the rest of the students. We met at Spencer

Street Station and took the bus to the gum trees of Mt

Evelyn. We shared rooms in groups of four, girls separate

from boys. We stayed up all night, as if by requirement,

and I jumped up and down on the trampoline in the gym to

stay awake. I walked to the top of the mountain with a

boy I had never met before. I was breathless with

anticipation. Would he kiss me?

He did not. We did not even hold hands. We simply

walked and talked. I was overwhelmed with the burden of

desire. I wanted more. But I do not think I experienced

his failure to touch me as rejection. He, too, was a good

Catholic. He, too, was shy. Perhaps this is why he chose

me to climb the mountain with him.

On the final afternoon the priest in charge of the camp

called us together for prayers. ‘If any of you have

anything you’d like to discuss with me of a personal

nature, please find me later for a chat.’ A chat—I heard

it as a call to confession. I wanted to confess to my sin

of desire, my sin of lust, my impure thoughts. The very

wanting seemed wicked. Others milled around the priest, a

young Dominican in a flowing white cassock with black

hood, fresh out of the seminary. I kept away.

At this time I was exchanging letters with my

favourite teacher from school, a nun. Among her words of

advice she wrote: ‘there is no definite length of time

for the duration of a kiss but you will know when it is

too long—when it changes from an expression of love to a

means of getting some selfish pleasure from the other.’ I

resisted the impulse to visit the priest to confess.

Something told me he would not understand. Priests were

celibate. How could a priest understand my desire?

Besides, I wanted to tell him other things. I wanted to

tell him about my father’s visits during the night.

During the blessing I imagined speaking to the

priest later, without the wire grille of the confessional

dividing us. I practised the words in my head, the words

I might say to the priest, in private away from the

throng of students, but I knew I could not speak them. In

his quiet office beyond the camp hall the words would

disappear before they even reached my mouth. Some

unspoken knowledge held me to secrecy. Even in the

letters I wrote to my favourite teacher, I could not

spell it out, though I tried often enough to let her know

that things were not right in my home.

My father had been surprised when my final marks at

school were good enough to take me to university. He

could imagine his sons at university, but not his

daughters. I did not tell him then that I had secured my

place by rote learning, parrot fashion, getting it all

inside and holding onto it for as long as I needed till

after the exam, then letting it drift away, like so much

spent paper. I could have filled several wastepaper

baskets with this torn-up knowledge, and when I reached

university I recognised the consequences. Assaulted by my

ignorance, I could not think. I could not write.

In that first year at university I walked most days

from Warrigal Road to the Cheltenham railway station to

take the train into the city. I carried a hardwood

clipboard with a silver fastener on top to which I

attached my loose-leaf sheets. I carried it in a calico

bag. After a day interspersed with lectures, I hurried

away from the psychology practice lab on the top floor of

the Redmond Barry Building where we had compiled lists of

things, such as how many students in each prac class

could roll their tongues to demonstrate a certain innate

genetic ability. We had experimented with memory; how

many words in a list could each remember. Words at the

beginning of the list and those at the end were the most

easily remembered. We were meant to complete these

experiments like scientists, but my work was sloppy. This

was not the psychology I had wanted to study. This was

not an exploration of the inner life of a person. This

did not help me to understand myself or anyone else,

especially my father.

I walked down the corridor past the black-framed

picture of Oscar Oeser, and other former dignitaries from

psychology. I heard sometimes, from my lecturers,

mutterings about the death of psychoanalysis. The real

stuff now was in behaviour and cognition. There was no

point in delving into the past, these people argued. The

past was irrelevant.

The hippies were everywhere, commanding us to make

love, not war. One evening, outside the Admin Buildings,

the radical students were gathering to demonstrate

against conscription to the Vietnam War. They wore ragged

clothes from the opportunity shop, the girls in long

granny skirts in velvet and calico and the longhaired

boys in jeans, chanting and waving banners.

I was wearing my tight woollen skirt, a hand-me-down

from my older sister, and stockings with sensible walking

shoes: the only pair I possessed. On Mondays, Wednesdays

and Fridays I wore my white jeans. I washed them every

second night and hung them to dry in front of the lounge

room heater after everyone had gone to bed. The skirt I

wore on the other two days, and washed it on weekends.

Although I told myself I did not want to be like these

hippie students, the ones making all the noise down near

the Union Building, I hated to see myself as old-

fashioned.

I hurried past the dangerous group of students. The

police had arrived with batons and shields. I had no more

lectures that day. I could leave the university for home,

not for the safety of home but for its familiarity. The

university was a place of strangeness. The hippies broke

rules. I obeyed them. But I could not obey the unwritten

rules at home, those unspoken rules that we should go

about our business as if everything were in order. My

father might drink too much. My father might at any

moment become abusive, violent like a ticking bomb, but

we should be polite to him and ignore him, like my mother

did under a veil of sweetness.

When I walked into my house through the front door

that evening I could see my father through the window. He

had the crumpled look that came over him when he had

drunk too much. I knew as soon as I walked past the

double glass doors of the lounge room that he would call

out to me. I tried to move past quickly.

‘How’s university?’ my father asked. ‘What are you

reading?’ He did not wait for an answer. ‘Have you read

Nietzsche yet?’ My mind shut down. I could not think. The

name held a significance I could not fathom. I knew

Nietzsche was a philosopher but I had not read his

writings. To me then Nietzsche was as ancient as ancient

history and I did not want to be troubled by him. I did

not want to tell my father that philosophy was not part

of my studies nor did I want to speak to him at all. I

mumbled a greeting and fled from the hallway.

Trauma

My mother stood at the kitchen stove weighing out

portions of the best steak, the best vegetables. My

father had diabetes and was on a restricted diet. My

mother had a pair of weighing scales on top of the bench.

She doled out everything, weighed and measured. She

cooked the steak in sizzling butter and the kitchen was

full of the smell of fresh meat and gravy the colour of

mud. We children ate bread and porridge, sometimes chicken

or rabbit, and pea soup with bacon bones, but we never

shared my father’s red meat. I told myself I did not miss

the red meat. All that blood. How little I understood in

those days. How mysterious it seemed. I looked for clues

to make sense of him, my father, this strange dark man

and the passions he exuded.

My father roamed the house at night looking for a

spare bed, a bed to share with another; most likely, I

thought then, with one of us, his daughters, starting

with the oldest. He checked at doors. I could hear the

rattle of the door handle; smell the alcohol on his

breath as he stood over me. I pretended to sleep. He

turned to my sister and I heard him busy himself with her

– the rustle of sheets, blankets peeled back, the murmurs

and creaks. I turned to face the wall, squeezed my eyes

shut and prayed that my turn might never come. When,

later, my father spoke to me of Nietzsche I saw it as a

prelude, a type of grooming. Soon my father would

practise on me.

By the time I had reached my second year at university

and had a real boyfriend, I rebelled against my father. I

learned not to ask questions. I learned to look into

books for knowledge. I took myself off to the Medical

Library and looked up books on human sexuality.

My favourite nun from school wrote me letters about

notions like ‘existential chastity’, which can be

realised, she wrote, only in the state of virginity, but

also in that of marriage. ‘An attitude of respect, of

consideration and fine restraint, which must be invoked

even in the sexual act where spiritual love finds bodily

expression, if this is to reach its perfection.’ None of

this should take place outside of marriage. She had

worried then, my favourite teacher wrote, that I was

‘going overboard with boys’, and that I should save my

love for my family and friends, and for marriage, unless

I should choose like her to be celibate.

At the end of this second year at university I

stopped writing to my favourite teacher when she, too,

finally left the convent. Then when I left home my mother

began to write me letters instead. ‘The thing that bugs

me’, my mother wrote, ‘is your ideas about sex without

marriage … When you want to live without any discipline

at all, you are not growing but heading for disaster …’

As a small child I had longed for letters addressed

to me. ‘You have to write letters to receive them’, my

mother said. She did not tell me what a risky business it

could be—even in those first letters to The Age’s

Children’s Corner. The stiff reply on a single sheet of

paper and the merit certificates had been enough for a

start. Letter writing was an intercourse of sorts, an

intimacy that felt safe, far safer than sex. There was no

need for the physical touch of another, only the sheen of

the envelope, the slicing open with penknife, the feel of

the paper, a whiff of perfume, the chemical smell of the

ink, the leftover hint of cigarettes, and then the words.

Nietzsche

When my father spoke to me of Nietzsche, he spoke of

someone and something I did not understand, some mystery—

the mystery of sex. I was 19 years old. Until then I did

not understand sexuality except for a muddled version my

older sister had told me five years earlier. She had

wanted me to know the facts of life, she said, not the

way she had learned them from our father, curled up on

his lap each Saturday morning. On Saturday mornings our

mother was away at work. I would scurry past the open

lounge room door, not wanting to look in, ashamed. There

was something about the way my father and sister sat

together, something about the way he held her sprawled

across his lap and whispered in her ear, something that

caused my cheeks to redden and my heart to race. My

father sought comfort in my sister. My father was

unhappy. He had needed more than my mother could offer.

Even when I wrote letters to my favourite teacher, I

could tell her none of this. Instead she advised me how

to deal with boys and I provoked her by telling her what

fun I was having with them.

My father later told me that Nietzsche was a

nihilist. It fitted with my sense of my father’s

negativity and despair. For years afterwards the idea of

reading Nietzsche became abhorrent to me. I imagined I

could never understand his writing. Nietzsche, I

imagined, was too much like my father. My father had

roamed the streets of Holland, as a latch key child, my

mother told me. His parents worked long hours, his mother

a cleaning lady, his father an archivist. When they came

home at the end of the day his mother cooked the best

pieces of meat for her husband, and the children ate

leftovers and scraps. As a young boy my father took

comfort in his studies as a way of overcoming the

hardship of his childhood, much like Nietzsche had sought

comfort in his studies. When I was younger I believed one

needed great intelligence to study philosophy.

Philosophers were society’s geniuses. Philosophers

plumbed the depths of knowledge in ways other mortals

could not.

I found out later, after university, that the cause

of Nietzsche’s ill-health—beginning in his childhood with

‘severe headaches, eye pain, nausea, colic, and general

debility’—is still uncertain; nevertheless it was

sufficiently severe that he could not marry, find ready

employment or make friends easily (Pletsch 1991: 182). As

a consequence it seems, Nietzsche was determined to ‘make

a virtue of deprivation’ and he consciously used his

isolation as the basis of much of his writing (Pletsch

1991: 207). After he had broken free of the institutions

to which he had once been attached, namely the church and

university, there were some who considered his writing

outrageous. But when my father spoke to me about

Nietzsche he turned him into an intellectual icon. He

reinstated the great man within the institutional

hierarchy. My father’s question, ‘Have you read him yet?’

put me outside of that institution, as much as he may

have intended to invite me in.

Nietzsche wrote about the ghosts of the past, the

great thinkers and artists from earlier civilisations,

including the Christian God under whose weight he and his

generation struggled. He was born into a family top heavy

with theologians and was steeped in the demands of

religion to be a good boy. My father, too, came from a

long line of religions. The story goes that my father had

been baptised five times throughout his childhood—no one

can say why—and later converted to Catholicism in order

to marry my mother. He too abandoned religion once his

experience of war and migration had turned him into a

nihilist. By then life had become meaningless for my

father. He lost himself in alcoholism and despair until,

a few short months before he died, he found God again in

the form of Judaism and began to learn Hebrew. Nietzsche

died similarly in a state of despair or madness—possibly

caused by tertiary syphilis, which it is believed he

first contracted when he was a student—but without the

redemption of a new language and religion (Pletsch 1991:

225).

Trying to study Nietzsche was, for me, like

struggling with mathematics. I could read and re-read his

ideas but I could not take them in. It was like a wall

before me that blocked my way. I was comforted to read

that others, too, struggled to understand Nietzsche’s

ideas, while some pluck sentences from his translated

works—as I have done at the beginning of this essay—and

spread them around like a sprinkling of sugar on

porridge. Like many significant thinkers Nietzsche made

absolute statements in one breath, only to reconsider

them in another. Absolute statements about abstract

ideas, as statements of fact, contradict the notion

Nietzsche himself espoused ‘that knowledge is useful only

insofar as it serves life’, and creativity as I

understand it arises from challenges to any sense of the

absolute. Reading Nietzsche’s philosophy can still make

my head hurt, but not so his letters.

Nietzsche was a man in advance of his time, who had

anticipated the roll of history as it unfolded; but he

died a ‘mad’ man who had struggled with his thoughts and

feelings. This Nietzsche had upset the establishment by

declaring that God is dead, and announcing the failure of

conventional morality as a guiding force. This Nietzsche

had declared through his notion of the Superman, his

Űbermensch, that one must find one’s own way and not be

driven always by one’s predecessors; one must assimilate

history to one’s own uses rather than be ruled by it. I

thought then that this Nietzsche was like my father. In

his writing it was as if he, Nietzsche, were trying to

shed the weight of the past. My father tried to shed it,

too. But no one of us can entirely shake our pasts free

from our present.

Letters to writers

In my filing cabinet I have another folder, ‘Letters to

and from writers’. It contains letters I have written to

those whose writing has inspired me to make contact. In

1997 I wrote to Drusilla Modjeska, emboldened by the

biography of her mother, Poppy. I wrote to Modjeska about

the difficulties of autobiographical writing, and she

responded on a postcard showing Grace Cossington Smith’s

The Lacquer Room. In her note Modjeska told me that writing

nonfiction and autobiography is not for the fainthearted,

but responses can be surprising. Those whom you imagine

will be critical of your efforts are not, and those whose

support you expect can turn on you. Writing letters is

for an audience of one. Writing for a larger audience

becomes more dangerous.

I wrote a series of letters to Helen Garner, one

after the publication of The first stone, another after The feel

of steel and finally after I had read Jo Cinque’s consolation. She

wrote back every time. Towards the end of 2004 I found

the courage to suggest a meeting on the pretext of my

doctoral thesis, ‘Life Writing and Revenge’. Garner wrote

back, a short note on a pink slip of paper: ‘I don’t know

that I know much about writing and revenge (not

consciously at least) but perhaps we could meet for

coffee and see what transpires’. We met in a café on

Brunswick Road and talked about the thin divide between

fact and fiction, about ways of reaching an audience and

about the desire for revenge.

‘It all depends on the sort of relationship you want

with your reader’, Garner said. ‘Your attitude to your

reader. You don’t have to tell everything but you can’t

be defensive’. We were sitting at a rickety table. One of

its legs did not reach the ground and I had to resist the

urge to stick something underneath to stop it from

shaking.

I had wanted to meet Garner for so long; I did not want

our meeting to end. But of course it did. After our

goodbyes, we stood at the intersection at right angles to

one another as we each waited for the lights to change

colour. I did not look back. Later I sat in my car and

took notes. I wrote a transcript of our time together as

a way of holding onto the experience and I puzzled over

my disappointment. I knew beforehand it had been

unrealistic of me to expect more—that I should be

grateful for any time together—but I had wanted more, an

ongoing friendship perhaps. I wrote more letters but

Garner did not respond.

I once sent a long passionate letter across the

world to the famous Alice Miller and did not hear back;

it took over two years before I received a formal letter

of thank you in reply to a letter I sent to Margaret

Humphreys after I had read her book The lost children of the

empire. These days I correspond with Gerald Murnane. I

have no desire to meet him. Letters are better.

I addressed my first letter to him as ‘the man of

the perfect sentence, the man whose writing I have come

to love, [who] sits on my shoulder like Nietzsche’.

Unlike Nietzsche, who tells me this is all nonsense, I

imagine the man of the perfect sentence will tell me he

is bored. Bored by my dishonesty, bored by my inability

to craft the perfect sentence, bored by my feeble

attempts at imitation and bored by my failure to follow

an image.

But it turns out that Murnane and I share too much

in common to be bored with one another. He is older than

me, but we were both raised in troubled Catholic

households, and we both write letters. Murnane has more

than 19 drawers of steel filing cabinets in which he

keeps his unpublished writings and his letters to and

from others. Since 2005 I have become one of his regular

correspondents. A writing friend, also a correspondent,

jokes that our words, hers and mine, will be archived

forever in one of those filing cabinets.

‘Letters are the great fixative of experience,’

writes Janet Malcolm. ‘Time erodes feeling. Time creates

indifference. Letters prove to us that we once cared.

They are the fossils of feeling. This is why biographers

prize them so: they are biography’s only conduit to

unmediated experience’ (Malcolm 1993: 110). Letters can

provide an unedited view of what goes on between Kafka’s

ghosts, the ghosts of the recipient and of oneself.

Nietzsche’s letter to Overbeck contains the metaphor of

life as a boat tossed on the sea, a boat as container.

Letters, too, are like containers. They carry us through

life, they contain our thoughts and feelings, they lead

us to new destinations.

These days I also use emails to connect, but I still

write letters. There is something sacred about the

written letter addressed at the top: the agonised

introduction, the long slow unfolding of my reasons for

writing, the vague apologies for my intrusiveness. All

these qualities go into my letters to distant writers

whose published writing I read as a letter to me, and a

call to respond.

When I slide my stamped addressed letter into the red

letter box, often addressed via the publisher of a

writer’s latest book, I brush a kiss against the

whiteness of the envelope to wish my letter well, in a

ritual of hope that my letter will be well received, and

that I might get a response, and not just another merit

certificate or a nod of approval from Nietzsche.

If Friedrich Nietzsche were alive today I would

write him a letter. I would write to let him know that I

am not scared of him any more. Now when Nietzsche sits on

my shoulder, I can spell his name without hesitating.

When Nietzsche sits on my shoulder, and looks down on the

page, then tells me my work is nonsense, I can shrug him

off and write him a letter instead, as if I were writing

a letter to my father, now long dead, and saying all the

things I never could have said while my father lived.

 

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