Beloved, This is your first letter from me: yet it is not the first I have written to you. There are letters to you lying at love’s dead-letter office in this same writing “€œ so many, my memory has lost count of them!…
” I believe a man, when he finds he has won, thinks he has taken the city by assault; he does not guess how to the insiders it has been a weary siege, with flags of surrender fluttering themselves to rags from every wall and window! No: in love it is the women who are the strategists; and they have at last to fall into the ambush they know of with a good grace.
You must let me praise myself a little for the past, since I can never praise myself again. You must do that for me now! There is not a battle left for me to win. You and peace hold me so much a prisoner, have so caught me from my own way of living, that I seem to hear a pin drop twenty years ahead of me: it seems an event! Dearest, a thousand times, I would not have it be otherwise: I am only too willing to drop out of existence altogether and find myself in your arms instead. Giving you my love, I can so easily give you my life. Ah, my dear, I am yours so utterly, so gladly! Will you ever find out, you, who took so long to discover anything?

from LETTER 1

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