Letters to Véra (Penguin Hardback Classics)

The thought that you exist is so divinely blissful in itself that it is ridiculous to talk about the everyday sadness of separation – a week’s, ten days’ – what does it matter?

My thick notebook with drafts will go to you – with a dedication in verse. Indirectly, in some meandering kind of way – like the story of the – you inspired me with this. Without you I wouldn’t have moved this way, to speak the language of flowers.

My darling, today I love you so sweetly, so joyfully – you don’t know how …

I dreamt of you last night – as if I was playing the piano and you were turning the pages for me …

I love this marvellous quickness in you, as if in your soul there’s a place prepared in advance for my every thought.

…’ I love you, my sun, my life, I love your eyes – closed – all the little tails of your thoughts, your stretchy vowels, your whole soul from head to heels.

You came into my life – not as one comes to visit (you know, ‘not taking one’s hat off’) but as one comes to a kingdom where all the rivers have been waiting for your reflection, all the roads, for your steps.

And most of all I want you to be happy and it seems to me that I could give you that happiness – a sunny, simple happiness – and not an altogether common one.

I swear – and the inkblot has nothing to do with it – I swear by all that’s dear to me, all I believe in – I swear that I have never loved before as I love you, – with such tenderness – to the point of tears – and with such a sense of radiance.

How can I explain to you, my happiness, my golden, wonderful happiness, how much I am all yours – with all my memories, poems, outbursts, inner whirlwinds?

Yes, I need you, my fairy-tale. Because you are the only person I can talk with about the shade of a cloud, about the song of a thought – and about how, when I went out to work today and looked a tall sunflower in the face, it smiled at me with all of its seeds.