The Last Language

I have been asked, I’m afraid, to explain myself.

Not by the court—they don’t want to hear it. And not by you, since we understand each other, and anyway they won’t let me write you. They’ve assured me of this several times, even though I haven’t asked. I am under no illusions. I see how it all looks. I saw it all along, and yet—here we are. I guess that’s the part that’s supposed to be interesting.

Nietzsche says we must cease to think if we refuse to do it in the prison house of language. This seems to imply we have an option. Tell me a story about Zembla, you used to say, or Tell me a story about Harvard. Tell me how you fell in love with language. Tell me how you fell in love with me. You’d tell me your own stories from your reading, your dreams, your own imagination—you had a real saga about a fortune teller and an illusionist and their great love affair in nineteenth-century New York City. I think you might have turned into a novelist, if we’d been allowed to go on.

I can only hope that in the long years ahead, your stories will sustain you. That it’s a better quality of silence, this time around. My deepest fear is that it isn’t—that I have woken you in your coffin only to leave you there, forever. And yes, I do know how this sounds—as though I imagine myself to have conjured you, raised you Lazarus-like into existence, when we both know quite the opposite is true.

What I really mean to say is that this is how it feels, sometimes: as though I have left you something worse than dead. If I have—oh please, my love: forgive me.

Oh please, my love: forgive me either way.