Life On the topic of clouds and love letters
posted by on October 5 at 17:00 PM
I love clouds.
And so this article, which led me to this website for the cloud appreciation society, is incredibly satisfying. Here is my favorite cloud of the bunch, June’s Moby Dick sexy pinup:
Which brings me to the subject of love letters. I’m speaking of old-fashioned romantic love letters. I’ve never received a love letter, and I’ve only written one in my life. It was to my first serious boyfriend in college. I was living in France at the time and missed him terribly. The letter contained the line “If you fuck Anita* (*not her real name), I will rip out your tongue with a shrimp fork. Happy Valentine’s Day!” Obviously, I suck at writing love letters. It was never sent because he fucked Anita before I got the chance.
It is extremely difficult, not to mention risky, to pen a successful love letter. Writing about love is an easy to slip into melodrama or cliché (e.g., “Our love is a fairy tale love the size of infinity”), and if the object of love rejects (or worse, ignores) the sender’s sentiment, the letter instantly becomes a token of failure and humiliation. The duality of the love letter is one of its draws. Another is the implicit privacy that surrounds it. In general, people don’t pen love letters to have them disseminated in the public. They are written for the satisfaction of the sender and the enjoyment of the receiver. Reading another person’s love letter, even with the consent of the author or object, is like voyeurism; a peek into someone else’s private and vulnerable insides.
Well-written love letters are touching. Poorly written ones are cringy and hilarious.
Which brings me to this website, created by a female who decided to write 300 love letters to family, friends, crushes, “dream lovers”, strangers, idols, roommates, etc. She was shooting for all types of love, which made her goal more interesting to read, but more convoluted.
By the end of this project I wanted to be able to write a love letter to anyone, a stranger on the street, or someone I have nothing but scorn for. I wanted to be able to pull out and vocalize the small thread connecting me to them, them to me, the something in them that I found beautiful or real…
The letters are organized on her website chronologically, and color coded by recipient (“pink/red = lovers, brown = people I don’t really like, gray = anyone”). Here’s an example of a brown love letter:
I know next to nothing about you. Only that you are broken hearted and that they almost cut off your arm and that there is some kind of nice electricity. It’s still too early to know if it’s just the electricity of I think you’re cute, you think I’m cute, or maybe something else…hmm…you are so full of possibility right now!
The draw of love letters is that they aren’t something you are forced to write, they’re something you are compelled to write. Can someone train his/herself to locate love, and write about love, in strangers and “people [you] don’t really like?” From her comments and letters I got the feeling that rather than expressing all types of love in letter form, the author was dwelling on/attempting to bait romantic love. Either way, it’s an interesting site if you like love letters, real or faux.
I'm a total cloud freak!!
http://www.cloudappreciationsociety.org/
Thank you thank you thank you for introducing me to the site. I'm in heaven (no pun intended).
Oh, dude, writing this post is just asking for it (melodramatic, cliched love letters, that is - sincere or parodic). Not that I would do such a thing.
Everyone enough interested in love letters to open this comments thread should check out those of Dorothy Osborne. Dorothy was a 17th-century genius and fuckup who wrote a playful, wise, and crushingly depressing series of love letters to her future husband. Virginia Woolf wrote about Dorothy 250 years later!
The ever-invaluable Project Gutenberg offers the full text of these beauties.
P.S.
This also seems like a good time to mention 'Constable's Clouds: Paintings and Cloud Studies by John Constable,' edited by Edward Morris. Constable, as well as being the second-best British painter of the 19th century, was really, really, REALLY into clouds. The book is actually quite a touching account of one man's love affair with weather phenomena.
Obviously, I suck at writing love letters. It was never sent because he fucked Anita before I got the chance.
So you wanted to fuck Anita, too?
Good love letters include quotations from e. e. cummings at a much higher rate than ordinary letters.
When it comes to love, Pablo Neruda has already written all that ever needs to be said:
De otro. Será de otro. Como antes de mis besos.
Su voz, su cuerpo claro. Sus ojos infinitos.
Ya no la quiero, es cierto, pero tal vez la quiero.
Es tan corto al amor, y es tan largo el olvido.
Porque en noches como ésta la tuve entre mis brazos,
mi alma no se contenta con haberla perdido.
Aunque ésta sea el último dolor que ella me causa,
y éstos sean los últimos versos que yo le escribo.
I'm pretty sure that's a photo of Hurricane Katrina. It's a shame that something so beautiful can be so destructive.
how fucking psyched would you be to receive a letter that said:
that they almost cut off your arm and that there is some kind of nice electricity. ?.
cut off my arm?? to reveal some sort of electricity?! jesus christ. i love this lunatic.
Good love letters describe the cutting off of body parts at a much lower rate than ordinary letters.
Comments Closed
In order to combat spam, we are no longer accepting comments on this post (or any post more than 14 days old).