"Nothing Ever Happened, so don't worry"
I particularly like the final paragraph (as do a lot of people, judging by the fact that that's the only part of the letter that seems to be published anywhere, mostly in spiritual quotation books and websites) but I prefer to read things in context, so I tracked down the whole thing here. I'm glad I did, because now I have a new favorite way to sign off on letters.
Your eternal old lady,
Colleen
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Monday, Jan 28, 1957
Dear Edie,
That was a beautiful letter you wrote me. I read some of it to Lucien later on.
You know, before Joan died, when I saw her in 1950, she said you were the greatest person (I think she said nicest) she had ever known.
As for Willy B., he's queening around now but as ever he never bothers me with that. Instead we take long walks in the evening with hands clasped behind our backs, conversing politely. He is a great gentleman and as you may know, has become a great writer, in fact all the bigwigs are afraid of him (W.H. Auden, etc.) Yes, he knows we're coming in February, late.
Allen never loses track of me even when I try to hide. He does me many favors publicizing my name. Well, we're old friends anyway. But I can't keep up the hectic “fame” life he wants and so I won't stay with them long in Tangiers. I'm going to get me a quiet hut by the sea on the Spanish coast, then join them in Paris in the Spring.
Escaping reality to go into simplicity is just what I do, except I regard reality as being simplicity. That is, God is Alone. Don't worry, I eat plenty, I have my cook kit in my pack and make delicious food wherever I go, when I have to. In NY naturally everybody invites me to big dinners in homes. But like in Spain and Europe, I'll make my pancakes and syrup with black coffee for breakfast, boil my big pot of Boston baked beans with salt port and molasses, make salads, eat French bread, cheese and dates for dessert. Etc.
I'll write you and you keep writing and if you suddenly get the impulse to see Europe I'll be here to show you around.
I have never left you either, and had many dreams of you, wild dreams where we're wandering in dark alleys of Mexico looking for a place to bang, etc.
I want to end my life as an old man in a shack in the woods, and I'm leading up to that soon as I dig the whole world including the orient. I'm invited to a Buddhist Monastery in Japan and will go within 5 years. Also other things. Make movies too, later. I'll have more money than I need. Or maybe only what I need. I'm glad to send my mother her reward, think eventually I'll take her out to California and get her a little rose covered cottage, and get me a shack for half the time, in the wild hills beyond Mount Tamalpais.
Hearing your voice at night over the phone, in a hotel where I'd gone to hide out to work, was like a strange and beautiful dream. You sounded warmer and more mature. You will always be a great woman. I have a lot of things to teach you now, in case we ever meet, concerning the message that was transmitted to me under a pine tree in North Carolina on a cold winter moonlit night. It said that Nothing Ever Happened, so don't worry. It's all like a dream. Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don't know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever. Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky ways of cloudy innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all. It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect. We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere, or one universal self. Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes through everything, is one thing. It's a dream already ended. I know this from staring at mountains months on end. They never show any expression, they are like empty space. Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away? Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence of mind, the one vast awakenerhood, empty and awake, will never crumble away because it was never born.
The world you see is just a movie in your mind.
Your eternal old man,
Jack
Dining à Deux
-the aforementioned Mme. Genevieve Antoine Dariaux, in her very fun to read book The Men in Your Life: Timeless Advice and Wisdom on Managing the Opposite Sex
In Defense of Wine
Duff Cooper and Susan Mary Patten in Venice, 1951
"I have already made mention of the happiness I have derived throughout my life from literature, and I should here, perhaps, acknowledge the consolation I have never failed to find in the fermented juice of the grape.
Writing in my sixty-fourth year, I can truthfully say that since I reached the age of discretion I have consistently drunk more than most people would say was good for me. Nor do I regret it. Wine has been to me a firm friend and a wise counsellor.
Often, as on the occasion just related, wine has shown me matters in their true perspective, and has, as though by the touch of a magic wand, reduced great disasters to small inconveniences. Wine has lit up for me the pages of literature, and revealed in life romance lurking in the commonplace. Wine has made me bold but not foolish; has induced me to say silly things but not to do them. Under its influence words have often come too easily which had better not have been spoken, and letters have been written which had better not have been sent.
But if such small indiscretions standing in the debit column of wine’s account were added up, they would amount to nothing in comparison with the vast accumulation on the credit side."
-from Duff Cooper's 1954 autobiography Old Men Forget
Whether you're a drinker or not, it's refreshing to read an old fashioned, unapologetic defense of indulgence of any kind in this age of juice cleanses and detox diets.
On Earnestness
Young people in big cities like New York, Mr. Gessen said, "are willing to acknowledge that they’re a class only ironically. So they’ll have their ironic kickball games. Their ironic magazines."
"They’re willing to have the privileges of their class," Mr. Gessen added, "to go to a good college, and be subsidized in their New York lives by their parents, but maybe not willing to be written about."
... "[Readers of n+1] can’t tell if we’re kidding," he said. "They can’t tell how much of it is in earnest."
"It’s all in earnest."
I know I'm way behind on looking into Keith Gessen and n+1, but I just read this (nearly 2-year old) interview promoting his book and I want to know much, much more. I may just shell out the $150 for a 2-year subscription and all the back issues.
n+1 seems like the anti-McSweeney's and right now that sounds very refreshing to me.
