“Ach, Tchekov! Why are you dead? Why can’t I talk to you in a big darkish room at late evening—where the light is green from the waving trees outside? I’d like to write a series of Heavens: that would be one.”
― Katherine Mansfield, Journal of Katherine Mansfield
Katherine Mansfield playing the cello, Queen’s College, Harley Street, London, between 1903-1905
“But she loved studying and books, the way other people love wine for its power to make you forget. What else did she have? She lived in a deserted, silent house. The sound of her own footsteps in the empty rooms, the silence of the cold streets beyond the closed windows, the rain and the snow, the early darkness, the green lamp beside her that burned throughout the long evenings and which she watched for hours on end until its light began to waver before her weary eyes: this was the setting for her life.”
― Irène Némirovsky, The Wine of Solitude
The sky lay over the city like a map showing the strata of things and the big full moon toppled over in a furrow like the abandoned wheel of a gun carriage on a sunset field of battle and the shadows walked like cats and I looked into the white and ghostly interior of things and thought of you and I looked on their structural outsides and thought of you and was lonesome.”
― Zelda Fitzgerald, Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda
“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited.”
― Sylvia Plath
“God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of “parties” with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter – they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship – but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.”
― Sylvia Plath
“Can you imagine looking into your glass some morning and seeing a disfigurement – some hideous change that has come to you while you slept? Well, I seem to myself like that – I can’t bear to see myself in my own thoughts – I hate ugliness, you know – I’ve always turned from it – but I can’t explain to you – you wouldn’t understand.” (I. xiv)
The House of Mirth, 1905
Edith Wharton
The House of Mirth (1905) is a novel by Edith Wharton. First published in 1905, the novel is Wharton’s first important work of fiction. It sold 140,000 copies between October and the end of December, and added to Wharton’s existing fortune. The House of Mirth was written while Edith Wharton lived at Tht,e Moun her home in Lenox, Massachusetts.
Although The House of Mirth is written in the style of a novel of manners, set against the backdrop of the 1890s New York aristocracy, it is considered American literary naturalism. Wharton places her tragic heroine, Lily Bart, in a society that she describes as a “hot-house of traditions and conventions. Source Wikipedia
Original Illustrations (1905)
Let me sleep
Leave me be
Let my eyes close
Leave my soul to fade away, forever more
Let me rest in peace
Leave my blood to freeze
Let me travel to the unknown
Leave the body; it’s just flesh and bone
Let my spirit wander in darkness
Leave memories of past in fondness
Burn this coffin, for I am not there
This burden is not for you to bear
Do not lament or shed tears
When serenity comes, I will be near
When you are lonely in silence of night
I will embrace you with all of my might
I will finally be at peace, no pain
How I will miss you, my tears will come with the rain
I am the air and the fog
Take a deep breath, I will feel your heart call
You are not alone, this you must remember
I will always remain, like a dying fire’s ember
In a place of tranquility. Taken away too soon (?)
Do not fear what is in store, what the future holds, do not feel gloom
Night falls again, I walk in the obscure
Never ending love / forever pure
In Memoria M.T.A
MCMXXXIII-MCMXCVII
William (Chili) Gonzalez
