i read somewhere... 31 december 2019...

without ignoring the calamities/ problems/ frustrations/ disasters in the world we have all created and are responsible for... but since it is the last day of the year and the last day of a decade, allow me to throw some positivity around, a little glitter, a little sparkle, a little hope, as the fight and the love continue before we all perish...

i shall share with you my last, for 2019, i read somewhere, full of hard work, the unlearning of the bullshit, the total destruction of anything toxic in your life, from the government to any relationships, including the one with yourself and all the revelations, reflections, results and directions, you'll be able to decipher and unravel and finally practice, when and not if, you get ready to take the leap...

i wish you all a better, different, spectacular start; stay healthy, safe, creative, radical, resistant and keep swimming... <3 span="">

ps. this is not to be considered as some self serving mumbo jumbo motherfucker; just a little reminder of what alive, thinking and doing can achieve. x

I invite you to say/ think this:

love everything about you, your beauty and pain, hungry soul, wounded longing, flaws and fears.
do not betray or deceive yourself
believe, forgive and adore yourself
accept, amuse and redeem yourself

feed and nourish your body and spirit
be with people who deserve us and vice versa
communicate with a yes and a no
respect our planet and its animals and plants, the rivers, lakes, oceans, skies and forests
spread the love
smash the bullshit patriarchy and all the shackles enslaving us all
believe that fortune will visit, to eradicate limitations and encourage braver horizons

devote yourselves and fight hard to cultivate
beauty, truth, love, justice, equality, tolerance, creativity, playfulness, and hope

"Every minute of every hour of every day you are making the world, just
as you are making yourself, and you might as well do it with generosity
and kindness and style."
Rebecca Solnit

know the problem, solve the problem and provide antidotes to the world's poisons, with love and power

"We should feel excited about the problems we confront and our ability to
deal with them.
Solving problems is one of the
highest and most sensual of all our brain functions."
Robert Wilson

remember
you can make a difference
stay humble and learn from it
help and serve your fellow person
take yourself serious and have fun with it too
remember the coin has two sides; a good and bad
take the leap, recognise your fears, how freeing
thank yourselves for having the nous to identify the idiocies and then smashing them

we are human, we are a cluster of everything fluid and messy, we are victorious.

with love and anticipation. 

i read somewhere... 20 may 2016...

i read somewhere:

"Exaggerate your flaws till they turn into virtues
Pretend your wounds are exotic tattoos
Refuse the gifts that infringe on your freedom
Shun sacred places that fill you with boredom
Keep in mind it's bad luck to be superstitious
The official story's always fictitious
Pump up your karma with idiot laughter
The promised land's here, not in some hereafter

We are searching for the answers
so we can destroy them and dream up better questions

Use your third eye to watch TV
Sing anarchist lullabies to lesbian trees
Think with your heart and feel with your head
Spit a mouthful of beer as far as you can
Kick your own ass and wash your own brain.
Make fun of your fears and heal your own pain
Play games with no rules, save your own life
Push your own buttons and be your own wife

We are searching for the answers
so we can destroy them and dream up better questions

Plunge butcher knives into accordions
Forgive yourself of all your mistakes except one
Commit funny crimes that don't break any laws
Shock yourself with how beautiful you are.
Tell jokes to clowns and cook feasts for chefs
Sing songs to the birds, and kill your own death
Mangle your anger, transform it to pleasure
Change your name, steal your own treasure

Go wash some water
Mock your own hypocrisy

Go burn some fire
Brag about your perplexity

Go wash some water
Advertise your secrecy

Go burn some fire
Overthrow reality"

"May I feel all I need to feel in order to heal; may I heal all I need to heal in order to feel." Marguerite Rigoglioso

remember: full moon in sagittarius the 21st and mercury turns direct the 22nd. brace yourselves, as the whooshing changes are imminent.
and have a great day. everything is all right and you are amazing. x

i read somewhere... 21 august 2018...

i read somewhere:

(this is a love week and beyond... )

I love you not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you. I love you not only for what you have made of yourself, but for what you are making of me.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Love imperfectly. Be a love idiot. Let yourself forget any love ideal.
Sark

Love is the only game where two can play and both win. Erma Freesman

Love is a great beautifier.
Louisa May Alcott

Fall in love over and over again every day. Love your family, your neighbours, your enemies, and yourself. And don't stop with humans. Love animals, plants, stones, even galaxies. Mary Ann and Frederic Brussat

I love you between shadow and soul. I love you as the plant that hasn't bloomed yet, and carries hidden within itself the light of flowers. I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. Because of you, the dense fragrance that rises from the earth lives in my body, rioting with hunger for the eternity of our victorious kisses.
Pablo Neruda

You are my inspiration and my folly. You are my light across the sea, my million nameless joys and my day's wage. You are my divinity, my madness, my selfishness, my transfiguration and purification. You are my fellow vagabond, my tempter and star.
George Bernard Shaw

love is healing and the answer and we all know that for sure.
the healing won't happen, as one imagines.
the healing will happen, if one tells the absolute truth.
all with soft, tender, unruly, elixir kisses, crazy sweet cuddle wrestles, brisk lessons, deep appreciations and ingenious affectionate amazements.

lots of good work to be done and how fortunate we all are if we get down to it in furtive energy and anticipation.

i dedicate this little readings to ALL the lovers and love fighters in the everywhere. 

i read somewhere... 10 august 2016...

i read somewhere:

I invite you to say any or all of the following lines out loud:

I love everything about me

I love my uncanny beauty and my bewildering pain

I love my hungry soul and my wounded longing

I love my flaws, my fears, and my scary frontiers

I will never forsake, betray, or deceive myself

I will always adore, forgive, and believe in myself

I will never refuse, abandon, or scorn myself

I will always amuse, delight, and redeem myself

So listen up. We'll make it brief. You're at a crossroads analogous to a dilemma that has baffled your biological line for six generations. We ask you now to master the turning point that none of us have ever figured out how to negotiate. Heal yourself and you heal all of us. We mean that literally. Start brainstorming, please.

Love thrives when neither partner takes things personally, so cultivate a devotion to forgiveness and divest yourself of the urge to blame.

Love is a game in which the rules keep changing, so be crafty and improvisational as you stay alert for each unexpected twist of fate.

Love enmeshes you in your partner's unique set of karmic complications, so make sure you're very interested in his or her problems.

Love is a laboratory where you can uncover secrets about yourself that have previously been hidden, so be ravenously curious.

Love is never a perfect match of totally compatible saints, so don't let sterile fantasies seduce you away from flawed but fecund realities.
Love is not a low-maintenance machine, so work hard on cultivating its unpredictable organic wonders.

Love is not a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hollywood, so don't let your romantic story be infected by the entertainment industry's simplistic, sentimental myths about intimate relationships.

LET'S GET ON WITH IT; WE ARE ALL RIGHT AND LIFE IS AMAZING... 

i read somewhere... 23 august 2016...

i read somewhere:

Whatever you choose to focus your attention on, you will get more of it. If you dwell on the good things you have already had the privilege to experience, you will expand your appreciation for their blessings, which in turn will amplify their beneficent impact on your life. You will also magnetise yourself to receive further good things, making it more likely that they will be attracted into your sphere. At the very least, you will get in the habit of enjoying yourself no matter what the outward circumstances are.

Bear in mind that you are a great wizard. You can use your powers to practice white magic on yourself instead of the other kind. The most basic way to do that is to concentrate on naming, savouring, and feeling gratitude for the blessings you do have—your love for your kid, the pleasures of eating the food you like, the sight of the sky at dusk, the entertaining drama of your unique fate. Don't ignore the bad stuff, but make a point of celebrating the beautiful stuff with all the exuberant devotion you can muster.

Speak the following lines out loud:
I love everything about me
I love my uncanny beauty and my bewildering pain
I love my hungry soul and my wounded longing
I love my flaws, my fears, and my scary frontiers

I will never forsake, betray, or deceive myself
I will always adore, forgive, and believe in myself
I will never refuse, abandon, or scorn myself
I will always amuse, delight, and redeem myself.

and remember:

"Every act of genius, is an act contra naturam: against nature." Indeed, every effort to achieve psychological integration and union with the divine requires a knack for working against the grain. Carl Jung

The great secret to becoming enlightened, is "to walk in all things contrary to the world." Jacob Boehme

"The basis of the spiritual approach to life, the foundation of the everyday practice of a person who lives the life of obedience to esoteric law, is the reversal of the more usual ways of thinking, speaking and doing." Paul Foster Case

have a great week, full of focus, gratitude and love. 

15 september 2013

i read somewhere:

"If everything seems under control, you're probably not moving fast enough." Mario Andretti
1. If you're not pretty much always half-confused, most likely you're not thinking deeply enough.
2. If you're not feeling forever amazed, maybe you're not seeing wildly enough.
3. The truth is fluid, slippery, vagrant, scrambled, promiscuous, kaleidoscopic, and outrageously abundant.
4. Sometimes the truth is a glittering diamond and at other times it's a stream of smoke.

"I was like a mole in a suburban backyard. I had just one little path I trod each day: to the compost pile and back. I chewed on orange rinds and leftover cabbage. I was tamed by the comfort of my familiar environment, content to have a narrow vision. But then I was eaten by a hawk, and became part of a wild, free body. Now I perch on the tops of trees and the peaks of roofs. I survey giddy-wide horizons, from the river to the mesa and far beyond. I have a wealth of choices. Where to fly? What to hunt? Who are my allies? My thoughts breathe deep, like the slow explosion of sun on the morning lake."

freeing the heart; loving again and back... yes? xx

i read somewhere... 8 may 2018...

today's mood.
i read somewhere...

love rules - the love rules - the rules of love (some)
from vincent, leo, emily, sark, rainer, blaise, erica, frederick and mary, pablo, emma, anais.

"I tell you the more I think, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people."

"Everything I understand, I understand only because I love.
Everything exists, only because I love."

"Until you have loved, you cannot become yourself."

"Love imperfectly. Be a love idiot. Let yourself forget any love
ideal."

"For one human being to love another is the most difficult
task. It is the work for which all other work is mere
preparation."

"If you do not love too much, you do not love enough."

"Love is everything it's cracked up to be. It really is worth
fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the
trouble is, if you don't risk everything, you risk even more."

"Fall in love over and over again every day. Love your family,
your neighbours, your enemies, and yourself. And don't stop
with humans. Love animals, plants, stones, even galaxies."

"To love is to tilt with the lightning, two bodies routed by a
single honey's sweet."

"The most vital right is the right to love and be loved."

"Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an
inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a
strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as
you wish without having to step outside it."

"There are two ways to reach me: by way of kisses or by way
of the
imagination. But there is a hierarchy: the kisses alone don't
work."

experiencing aloneness, i discover connection
turn to face my fear, i meet the warrior in me
open to my loss and pain and ignorance, i remind me of myself and purpose
surrendering into emptiness, I find endless fulfillment
if i flee, I am pursued
if i welcome, i am transformed

"I do want to create art beyond rage. Rage is a place to begin, but not end.
"I do want to devour my demons—despair, grief, shame, fear and use them to nourish my art. Otherwise they'll devour me."
Sandra Cisneros

be alert for creative inspiration that strikes you in the
midst of seemingly mundane circumstances.
do not believe what your read in sold out to greed and immorality, papers.
trust your gut.
do your thing.
be thankful. be grateful.
and breathe.
the sun is shining, times are challenging; stay safe.

i read somewhere... 29 october 2018

i read somewhere (thought and wrote accordingly):

emotional and spiritual food.
the influences that make you stronger
the people who see you for who you really are
the situations that teach you life-long lessons
the beauty that replenishes your psyche
the symbols that consistently restore your balance
the memories that keep feeding your ability to rise to each new challenge. then, pay it forward.

do your best in every single thing you do
uphold the highest possible standards in every aspect of your life.

sustain impeccable levels of integrity
be fiercely honest, fair and kind
do not obstruct the flow of your natural intelligence
respect yourself and others and try to do what you love from this day forward or later - goal set up - at least 51% of the time. at the very least, i would say 80%

deepen and intensify your commitment to the most
important person in your life: you
i am not promoting selfishness here, but encouraging self love and preservation, because:
the most important person in the scenario is you
no one is going to look after you better than you
you cannot love anyone properly, unless you love yourself properly (very old news, this one and it does not need a shaman to master and understand
fall in love with yourself, be your own perfect date

extending that love and more positive for thoughts
if we focus on the bad, then we feel crippled in doing anything constructive and change things in our world
but if we remain hopeful in bad and challenging times, we'll then resume the energy to act
"The future is an infinite succession of presents, and
to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvellous victory."
H. Zinn

my heart and mind are racing with adrenaline ideas, pain, sorrow, faith, action, hope and love.

what happened in pittsburgh was an abomination of humanity, but we won't be broken
what is happening in brazil, is beyond disgusting, but we shall resist

stay a revolutionary crusader and agitator, stay alert, stay faithful, stay kind and above all, stay lovers of the world.
this is scorpio season, full of mystery and truth... we shall and MUST overcome. together. 

i read somewhere... 14 june 2016...

i read somewhere:

"That which is not slightly distorted lacks sensible appeal, from which it follows that irregularity - that is to say, the unexpected, surprise and astonishment -- is an essential part and characteristic of beauty."
Charles Baudelaire

"Life is a vast and intricate conspiracy designed to keep us well-supplied with blessings."

"But whether it's our time to ferment in the valley of shadows or rise up singing in the sun-splashed meadow, fresh power to transform ourselves is always on the way. Our suffering won't last, nor will our triumph. Without fail, life will deliver the creative energy we need to change into the new thing we must become."

and breathe... x

an angel departed...

missed, but never forgotten... my love for maya is eternal and i'm grateful and fortunate for her words... 

Maya Angelou on Identity and the Meaning of Life

by Maria Popova

“Life loves the liver of it. You must live and life will be good to you.”

The light of the world has grown a little dimmer with the loss of the phenomenal Maya Angelou, but her legacy endures as a luminous beacon of strength, courage, and spiritual beauty. Angelou’s timeless wisdom shines with unparalleled light in a 1977 interview by journalist Judith Rich, found in Conversations with Maya Angelou (public library) — the same magnificent tome that gave us the beloved author’s conversation with Bill Moyers on freedom — in which Angelou explores issues of identity and the meaning of life.

Reflecting on her life, Angelou — who rose to cultural prominence through the sheer tenacity of her character and talent, despite being born into a tumultuous working-class family, abandoned by her father at the age of three, and raped at the age of eight — tells Rich:

I’ve been very fortunate… I seem to have a kind of blinkers. I just do not allow too many negatives to soil me. I’m very blessed. I have looked quite strange in most of the places I have lived in my life, the stages, spaces I’ve moved through. I of course grew up with my grandmother: my grandmother’s people and my brother are very very black, very lovely. And my mother’s people were very very fair. I was always sort of in between. I was too tall. My voice was too heavy. My attitude was too arrogant — or tenderhearted. So if I had accepted what people told me I looked like as a negative yes, then I would be dead. But I accepted it and I thought, well, aren’t I the lucky one.

She later revisits the question of identity, echoing Leo Buscaglia’s beautiful meditation on labels, as she reflects on the visibility her success granted her and the responsibility that comes with it:

What I represent in fact, what I’m trying like hell to represent every time I go into that hotel room, is myself. That’s what I’m trying to do. And I miss most of the time on that: I do not represent blacks or tall women, or women or Sonomans or Californians or Americans. Or rather I hope I do, because I am all those things. But that is not all that I am. I am all of that and more and less. People often put labels on people so they don’t have to deal with the physical fact of those people. It’s easy to say, oh, that’s a honkie, that’s a Jew, that’s a junkie, or that’s a broad, or that’s a stud, or that’s a dude. So you don’t have to think: does this person long for Christmas? Is he afraid that the Easter bunny will become polluted? … I refuse that… I simply refuse to have my life narrowed and proscribed.

To be sure, beneath Angelou’s remarkable optimism and dignity lies the strenuous reality she had to overcome. Reflecting on her youth, she channels an experience all too familiar to those who enter life from a foundation the opposite of privilege:

It’s very hard to be young and curious and almost egomaniacally concerned with one’s intelligence and to have no education at all and no direction and no doors to be open… To go figuratively to a door and find there’s no doorknob.

And yet Angelou acknowledges with great gratitude the kindness of those who opened doors for her in her spiritual and creative journey. Remembering the Jewish rabbi who offered her guidance in faith and philosophy and who showed up at her hospital bedside many years later after a serious operation, Angelou tells Rich:

The kindnesses … I never forget them. And so they keep one from becoming bitter. They encourage you to be as strong, as volatile as necessary to make a well world. Those people who gave me so much, and still give me so much, have a passion about them. And they encourage the passion in me. I’m very blessed that I have a healthy temper. I can become quite angry and burning in anger, but I have never been bitter. Bitterness is a corrosive, terrible acid. It just eats you and makes you sick.

Painting by Basquiat from Angelou's 'Life Doesn't Frighten Me.' Click image for more.

At the end of the interview, Angelou reflects on the meaning of life — a meditation all the more poignant as we consider, in the wake of her death, how beautifully she embodied the wisdom of her own words:

I’ve always had the feeling that life loves the liver of it. You must live and life will be good to you, give you experiences. They may not all be that pleasant, but nobody promised you a rose garden. But more than likely if you do dare, what you get are the marvelous returns. Courage is probably the most important of the virtues, because without courage you cannot practice any of the other virtues, you can’t say against a murderous society, I oppose your murdering. You got to have courage to do so. I seem to have known that a long time and found great joy in it.

The totality of Conversations with Maya Angelou is a powerful portal into the beloved writer’s soul. Complement it with Angelou on home, belonging, and (not) growing up, her children’s verses about courage illustrated by Basquiat, and her breathtaking reading of “Phenomenal Woman.”

love continues as always and so is freedom...

relating and referencing... where is amelia??

Amelia Earhart on Marriage

by Maria Popova

“I cannot guarantee to endure at all times the confinements of even an attractive cage.”

Charles Darwin gleefully weighed the pros and cons of marriage, ultimately deciding in its favor, while Susan Sontag called it “an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings.” But marriage, of course, is like most things in life — all else being equal, you get out of it exactly what you put in.

Amelia Earhart — pioneering aviator, bestselling author, and one altogether fierce lady — must have known that when she sat down on the morning of February 7th, 1931, and penned this exacting, resolute letter to her publicist and future husband, George Putnam. Found in the out-of-print volume Letters from Amelia, 1901-1937 (public library), it spells out (typo notwithstanding) exactly what Earhart wanted — and didn’t want — in a marriage, a bold testament to her independent spirit and liberal mindset just before the golden age of the housewife and shortly after the era of Victorian sexism.

Noank
Connecticut

The Square House
Church Street

Dear GPP

There are some things which should be writ before we are married — things we have talked over before — most of them.

You must know again my reluctance to marry, my feeling that I shatter thereby chances in work which means most to me. I feel the move just now as foolish as anything I could do. I know there may be compensations but have no heart to look ahead.

On our life together I want you to understand I shall not hold you to any midaevil code of faithfulness to me nor shall I consider myself bound to you similarly. If we can be honest I think the difficulties which arise may best be avoided should you or I become interested deeply (or in passing) in anyone else.

Please let us not interfere with the others’ work or play, nor let the world see our private joys or disagreements. In this connection I may have to keep some place where I can go to be myself, now and then, for I cannot guarantee to endure at all times the confinements of even an attractive cage.

I must exact a cruel promise and that is you will let me go in a year if we find no happiness together.

I will try to do my best in every way and give you that part of me you know and seem to want.

A.E.

The two married that afternoon. Putnam had proposed six times before Earhart finally said her highly conditional “yes.” She kept her last name and refused to be called Mrs. Putnam, even against The New York Times’ insistence. They remained together until Earhart’s tragic disappearance in 1937.

thinning threads

the world is getting smaller and life is getting nearer to the demise, so what have we learned so far?


it is sunday.

it is may, with scattered showers and rays and sometimes, at the same time, the sky plays hide and seek with the clouds.

in london, uk.

the fight continues and it's all very exciting indeed... 

and bewildering

and isolating

and... i'll be back... 

it's high time i wrote to you... a letter...

The Letter Is Dead, Long Live the Letter

by Maria Popova

“Everyone writes a letter in the virtual image of his own soul. In every other form of speech it is possible to see the writer’s character, but in none so clearly as in the letter.”

My great-grandfather was an astronomer who used to excitedly awaken his kids in the middle of the night and rush them, barely conscious and begrudging, to his telescope on the roof to observe the occasional cosmic marvel. He raised two sons and two daughters — including my grandmother, after whom I was named — through wartime Bulgaria, and tickled them into that lifelong itch of curiosity and wonder. In his final years, great-grandfather Georgi was living by himself in a small apartment without so much as a landline, hundreds of miles away from my grandmother, who by then was raising a family of her own while working as one of the few female civic engineers in the country. When he fell gravely ill in May of 1984, he wrote my grandmother a letter to tell her about the fatal medical prognosis and mailed it across the country. But he made a mistake — on the envelope, addressed to the correct building, he wrote “apartment 2″ instead of “apartment 5,” so the letter never made it to my grandmother. She got news of her father’s death in early June, from one of her brothers. Six weeks later, she found the letter in the building’s shared mailbox, the ghostly neverland of misdeliveries that residents rarely checked.

A week after that, I was born.

I never met my great-grandfather, whom I imagine I would’ve admired and loved enormously, but my grandmother’s heartbreaking story of postal misfortune, which she only recently shared with me and which pains her to this day, left me newly shaken with the power of so seemingly simple a thing as a letter — a medium that’s always held enormous allure for me, a humble page that blossoms into a grand stage onto which great romances are played out,great wisdom dispensed, and great genius manifested. But what exactly is it about a letter that reaches such depths, and what ineffable, immutable piece of humanity are we losing as the golden age of writing letters sets into the digital horizon?

That’s precisely what Simon Garfield, who has previously explored how our modern obsession with maps was born, seeks to illuminate in To the Letter: A Celebration of the Lost Art of Letter Writing (public library) — a quest to understand what we have lost by replacing letter-writing with email-typing and relinquishing “the post, the envelope, a pen, a slower cerebral whirring, the use of the whole of our hands and not just the tips of our fingers,” considering “the value we place on literacy, good thinking and thinking ahead.”

Frida Kahlo's love letters to Diego Rivera. Click image for details and translation.

Garfield writes:

Letters have the power to grant us a larger life. They reveal motivation and deepen understanding. They are evidential. They change lives, and they rewire history. The world once used to run upon their transmission — the lubricant of human interaction and the freefall of ideas, the silent conduit of the worthy and the incidental, the time we were coming for dinner, the account of our marvelous day, the weightiest joys and sorrows of love. It must have seemed impossible that their worth would ever be taken for granted or swept aside. A world without letters would surely be a world without oxygen.

Garfield attributes a good deal of the humanity of the letter — something he so poetically terms its “physical candor and the life-as-she-is-suffered quality” — to the tangibility of how it travels from sender to recipient. Though we know a great more today about how information travels on the internet, Garfield argues for an “intrinsic integrity” that letters hold over other modes of communication and explains:

Some of this has to do with the application of hand to paper, or the rolling of the paper through the typewriter, the effort to get things right first time, the perceptive gathering of purpose. But I think it also has something to do with the mode of transmission, the knowledge of what happens to the letter when sealed. We know where to post it, roughly when it will be collected, the fact that it will be dumped from a bag, sorted, delivered to a van, train or similar, and then the same thing the other end in reverse. We have no idea about where email goes when we hit send. We couldn’t track the journey even if we cared to; in the end, it’s just another vanishing. No one in a stinky brown work coat wearily answers the phone at the dead email office. If it doesn’t arrive we just send it again. But it almost always arrives, with no essence of human journey at all. The ethereal carrier is anonymous and odorless, and carries neither postmark nor scuff nor crease. The woman goes into a box and emerges unblemished. The toil has gone, and with it some of the rewards.

Fiona Apple's handwritten letter about her dying dog. Click image for details and full text.

Although much of his argument is premised on these romanticized rewards that stem from the letter’s traditional form — arguments not entirely convincing beyond the automatic sentimentality of nostalgia — Garfield makes his strongest point perhaps inadvertently, in an aside, discussing the letters of 14th-century scholar Petrarch, which used to run over a thousand words. Those letters, Garfield notes, were “not only readable but still worth reading” — and therein lies the bittersweet mesmerism of the letter as a cultural genre: With the ease and rapidity of email, how much of our textual exchanges actually end up being truly worth reading? Rereading?

But the best, most eloquent articulation of just what makes the letter worthy comes from one of Garfield’s ancient-world epistolary champions. Demetrius, who lived sometime between the fourth century B.C. and the fourth century A.D., captured the essence of the perfect letter:

The letter should be a little more formal than the dialogue, since the latter imitates improvised conversation, while the former is written and sent as a kind of gift. . . . The letter should be strong in characterization. Everyone writes a letter in the virtual image of his own soul. In every other form of speech it is possible to see the writer’s character, but in none so clearly as in the letter.

One of countless letters of audacious requests Mark Twain received. Click image for more.

Garfield’s core argument, while anchored a tad too stubbornly and narrowly to the preservation of letters as a medium, speaks powerfully to a broader urgency — the increasingly endangered species of meticulous, thoughtful self-revelation and deep mutual understanding through the written word in the age of reactionary responses and knee-jerk replies. He captures this beautifully:

Great miserabilist that he was, Philip Larkin was spot-on with his famous line from ‘An Arundel Tomb’ … what will survive of us is love. Letters fulfill and safeguard this prophecy. Without letters we risk losing sight of our history, or at least its nuance. The decline and abandonment of letters — the price of progress — will be an immeasurable defeat.

Charles Eames's proposal letter to Ray Eames. Click image for details and full text.

To the Letter goes on to explore the history of letters and the humanity of letter-writing across the millennia, from ancient Greece to the Enlightenment to the invention and advent of the internet, covering the entire spectrum of genres from sales letters to love letters and exploring the intricacies of what makes a perfect letter. Complement it with this fantastic 1876 guide to the art of letter-writing, then revisit some of modern history’s most rereadable letters.