[No surviving envelope]
If your letter has lain for some time in my pocket unanswered, it has not been out of my mind. Nor indeed has the problem, the situation of you and me been out of my mind, in these two years, for one day. But you can imagine, I think, that it might not be an easy letter to answer; it has been rewritten many times in my head. I don’t know whether my feelings can be made intelligible – I cannot say that I wholly understand myself or the process by which I have got to what I am – but one wants to avoid as far as possible misunderstanding where misunderstanding, by some simplification or false analogy, might be so easy.
TheEliot, Vivien (TSE's first wife, née Haigh-Wood)her death;f3TSE's shifting response to;a3 adjustment has been difficult enough. I cannot, and do not wish to draw comparisons; I only say it was a great shock to me, from which I can only partially recover; that it is a permanent grief and often an active pain. This, in my own kind: it is a different kind of pain and no comparison can be made. ButHale, Emilyrelationship with TSE;w9TSE's reasons against marrying;c5 I have reviewed the situation, and questioned myself, constantly – for it always seems, among other things, so unreasonable and almost demented. And yet the result is always the same: that the prospect of sharing my life with another person in complete intimacy is one before which I recoil. To call it simply laziness, or selfishness, is not satisfactory: that could not account for the strength of the feeling of panic. Perhaps I ask too much of life, in this respect, that the impossibility of complete identification with another person gives me a vision of loneliness far greater than the loneliness of being alone. This is a sort of ultimate feeling which can only be experienced but not explained, perhaps.
I dislike to talk or write in this way, as it seems to put me in the position of thinking only of myself – and that, so far as it is analysable, is only an element in a total pain, in which the thought of you and your life is the most important. I have always found that one can never recover from those mistakes one has made which have hurt other people: those which have hurt only oneself can be forgotten or borne.
Whether I should have written before on this matter I do not know. I have often thought about it; and it seemed to me that I ought not to do so except in response to some direct question from yourself, such as you have just put.
You have told me that you were hurt by my saying that I should have to get to know you all over again, or something to that effect, and I am sorry I wrote that: but it seems to me to correspond somewhat to what you yourself feel when you say that ‘beyond this answer, I cannot see how I can relate myself to you at all’. I only know, my dear, that you mean a very great deal to me – there has been no other woman in my life at all; that I always long to be in touch with you, and that any long silence between us makes me unhappy; and that your unhappiness is mine.
I may continue this: I think that would be better at least than holding this letter up any longer. It would have been written nearly a week ago, but that I was distracted by an unfortunate occasion of bitterness between two people, in which I was involved as a friend of both, and in which an oversight on my part has made matters worse, which upset me too much to concentrate.