[22 Paradise Rd., Northampton, Mass.]
This is my last chance of writing for a week – I would have written before, but there was no boat during the latter part of the week. This goes on your birthday, and I will write again on Saturday night, on my return from Edinburgh. How I look forward to than [sc. that] being over!
I have your letter of the 12th, and I trust that you eventually received my reply to your steamer-journal. IWoolfs, thehost TSE for weekend;d4 am not sure, now, whether I did write anything about my weekend at the Woolfs – sometimes my mind skips a revolution between letters, butWoolf, Leonardshows TSE rings of Saturn;a6 it doesn’t seem important enough to write about now, except that I saw the rings of Saturn for the first time, and the moons of Jupiter, through Leonard’s new telescope. But astronomy rather frightens me, like precipices. ThankElsmith, Dorothy Olcott;a3 you for sending Mrs. Elsmith’s card, with her flattering mention of me also – though I prize the front still more than the back.1 I am eager to know what garments, if any, you have bought as a birthday present.
I am a little anxious lest you find your ‘housekeeping’ – getting your own breakfasts and clearing them up, and looking after your rooms – becoming rather heavy with all your work to do. IHarvard UniversityTSE's student cooking at;b3 should hate to have to get my own breakfast now, though I did it for three years in the Harvard Graduate School – and from my experience I wonder whether you give yourself enough breakfast: but it is easy to boil an egg, and just as easy to boil two, and they make no mess and give the minimum of washing up, and tea is easily made, and toast and marmalade and good butter is possible: so please don’t dash out to work after a dish of corn flakes and half a cup of cold milk. Are your rooms properly heated?
I confess that I am very glad to hear Dr. Lawrence’s opinion, which sounds to me very wise: but when he speaks of injections does he mean you come down to Boston once a month, or does he mean to arrange for you to have the injections locally? I trust the latter; for I feel that frequent visits to Boston, apart from the expense, would be so fatiguing as almost to nullify the benefit of the injections. IHale, Emily Jose Milliken (EH's mother);c1 do not speak of your visit to your mother, because I know too well what that must have cost you.
IHale, Emilyreligious beliefs and practices;x1source of worry to EH;b1 only don’t want you to take your present feelings about values, revision of your life, etc. too heavily. This is not an attempt to be merely soothing, but my experience, such as it is, of such feelings. It is partly mistaken, and therefore dangerous, at any point to say: ‘Up to now I have been all wrong and all blind, but now I see and am going to revolutionise my life’. For one thing, one’s past hasn’t been quite so wrong as one sees it at such moments, and for another one’s immediate future isn’t going to be so different as one hopes. Therefore, one is in risk of another vision of ‘up to now I have been wrong’: one should be wary of an ambition which may expose one to despair. I don’t say at all that there are not sudden turning points in one’s life, when one does ‘change’ suddenly for the better: only one does not know which moments they are until long after. It is necessary to have deliberate intentions and plans for improvement of one’s life; but I always remind myself: ‘The next step, and the ground may give way under you; and you will realise that when you thought you were walking away steadily from your old sins and faults, you were only aiming straight at new ones’. Never feel overwhelmed by one’s past: and never feel certain of one’s future – that is the advice I can give myself. AndChristianitysins, vices, faults;d5among saints;b1 itChristianitysainthood;d4susceptible of different sins;a3 is certainly a matter, not of my experience but of the experience of the saints, that every advance in spirituality, while it preserves one from the possibility of committing old sins, opens up possibilities of new ones. StSt. John of the Crosson spiritual sin;a6. John of the Cross on ‘spiritual sin’, long after he had passed beyond the possibility of sin on the ordinary human plane, is most instructive.2 ForChristianitysins, vices, faults;d5proportionate to spiritual progress;b2 at every stage of development, there is some danger to which we are exposed: the higher we go, the greater the danger. I have only got far enough to be able to see, first, that the same sin in me would be a greater sin than for a man who had not got so far; and second, that there are new possibilities of different sin. This all may sound very alarming; but what it is meant to convey is this: that we are not to brood on the past, because our past sins are not so great as they appear – because they were committed by people who were less conscious than we are now. We are not to think about them, because if we do we are more likely to fall into a pit which we might have noticed: but on the one hand rejoice that by the grace of God we have been brought beyond them, and on the other remember that our present state has its own dangers – we have to find out at every step: what would be sin for me now. And so we go on. I may say all this again and again, because it will take me a long time to understand it and to be able to put it into words properly.
I go tomorrow night to Edinburgh; I am back for breakfast on Saturday; and I will write over the weekend.
1.Not traced.
2.St John of the Cross expatiates upon ‘spiritual sins’ – pride, gluttony, wrath, envy, sloth – in Dark Night of the Soul, trans. E. Allison Peers (1935; revised 1953). Through the dark night, the soul becomes ‘free and disencumbered and at rest from all knowledge and thought, troubling not themselves, in that state, about what they shall think or meditate upon, but contenting themselves with merely a peaceful and loving attention toward God, and in being without anxiety, without the ability and without desire to have experience of Him or to perceive Him. For all these yearnings disquiet and distract the soul from the peaceful quiet and sweet ease of contemplation which is here granted to it’ (I, x, 65). The soul is ‘purged’ of spiritual sin ‘in this aridity of the desire and acquires the virtues opposed to them; for, softened and humbled by these aridities and hardships and other temptations and trials wherein God exercises it during this night, it becomes meek with respect to God, and to itself, and likewise with respect to its neighbour. So that it is no longer disturbed and angry with itself because of its own faults, nor with its neighbour because of his, neither is it displeased with God, nor does it utter unseemly complaints because He does not make it holy’ (I, xiii, 79).
4.TSEElsmiths, theseminal Woods Hole stay with;a1Elsmith, Dorothy Olcott
13.LeonardWoolf, Leonard Woolf (1880–1969), writer and publisher; husband of Virginia Woolf: see Biographical Register.