Could you become the person whose name you read there?

 

When my Aunt Judi joined the nunnery, my grandmother kept in touch with her through letters.  Every day, the story is, she would write her daughter a letter.  That story left a deep impression on me. I remember thinking "THAT is an act of love."

One of my favorite takes on letter writing is P.J. Harvey's "The Letter."  

It turns me on
To imagine
Your blue eyes
On my words
Your beautiful pen
Take the cap off
Give me a sign and I'd come running

One of the benefits of traveling is the thinking about it before you actually leave.  One of the benefits of writing letters is the imagining of the other.  In this verse she thinks about the beloved's eyes.  The imagining turns into an invitation.  In the first verse, the invitation turns into longing:

Put the pen
To the paper
Press the envelope
With my scent
Can't you see
In my handwriting
The curve of my g?
The longing

There's a new book that publishes for the first time the classic Rainer Maria Rilke "Letters to a Young Poet" along with the actual letters OF the "young poet" Franz Kappus to Rilke.  The New Yorker reviews it here.   The reviewer writes: "To hold a letter addressed to you and see your own name in another’s hand is to feel an unsettling kind of pleasure. Even before you’ve opened the envelope, your identity has been refracted through someone else’s. The invitation is both estranging and thrilling: Could you become the person whose name you read there?"