31 October

31 October 1920

Villa Isola Bella Menton, France

My dear Love Your Thursday letter & Hardys letter have arrived. I shall keep Hardy's letter for you - unless you'd rather have it back. Ill put it in my Spenser. In reply to your letter: I don't doubt for one instant that your feelings and mine have been alike: that we have been haunted again by our strange correspondences. Your letter might be my letter - if you know what I mean. You say just what I had meant to convey in my letter and I too, feel that I don't want a God to appeal to - that I only appeal to the spirit that is within me You say you "dearly love to know exactly what I feel". I thought I had told you. But my writing is so bad, my expression so vague that I expect I didn't make myself clear. Ill try to.

"Between the acting of a dreadful thing

And the first motion, all the interim is

What a book            Like a phantasma or a dreadful dream;
is hidden                 The genius and the mortal instruments
here!                      Are then in council; and the state of man

Like to a little Kingdom suffers then
The nature of an insurrection." ***

The "thing" was not always "dreadful" neither was the "dream", and you must substitute "spirit" for genius. Otherwise there you have my life as I see it up till now - complete with all the alarms, enthusiasms, terrors, excitements - in fact the nature of an insurrection. Ive been dimly aware of it many times. Ive had moments when it has seemed to me that this wasn't what my little Kingdom ought to be like - yes and longings and regrets. But only since I came away this time have I fully realised it - confronted myself as it were, looked squarely at the extraordinary "conditions" of my existence.    [Letter to J. M. Murry in Collected Letters]