at all but building into itself new errors, deviations … and I just want to look at the girls walking back and forth from the silk mill, go to the Opera, visit the olivewood near Menaggio, not think about this. But then I feel the table against my back— is it my back or his?—I feel the cold instrument, not deft enough as it makes its incision or attaches one horrid part to another … I wonder whose hand it’s in now, the instrument, now that my own hand’s so shaky. Each thought an ignorant wave breaking over me—
She’d grown weaker, had returned to London. As I watched her hand sicken (I was surprised it still came) I felt my muteness spreading even further, past my ugly throat, past anything to do with words.
The Dr. says it’s a “functional derangement in the nerves.” But what’s that? Even he seems puzzled
Now he says it’s a “neuralgia of the heart.” nobody knows what’s wrong with me
they say they can operate to relieve pressure on the spine. But I feel there’s something in my brain, XXXX … and nothing’s like it was … sometimes the whole right side of me goes numb
last night in my dream there were silent corrections but they were correcting the things that were right and not touching the wrong ones. everything is mixed up
“Cosi al vento nelle foglie lievi/ Si perdea la sentenza di Sibilla.” six years now since I’ve kept my journal
to investigate: to search or inquire into, to examine systematically … to trace out… to track …
my first Chapter wasn’t good enough. I wish I could re-write it… those letters from Walton to his sister
I need to cross out “situation,” replace it with “solitude,” need to cross out “wonderful” put in “strange”—and my creature, is he cold beneath those trees? I should have kept him warmer
but I also hated him
Need to cross out “Carnigan” and put in “Dearest Clerval” … need to … but that’s Shelley’s hand writing in the margin
“Maie’s not well. Mary continues to feel unwell” “Wander no more from kindling brain to brain”
I’m not gentle like Fanny. Why after all these weeks did he it was his frequent habit to read aloud to me
I have also finished the 4 Chap. of Frankenstein which is a very long one & I think you would like it.
Last Wednesday I saw Dr. Bright at Guy’s Hospital. He said to me, “I am very fond of seeing,” and observed me for some time. He’s diagnosed me with a tumor of the brain.
I loved Italy best but Italy is a murderer I shrank from the monster—he held out his hand but I couldn’t touch it
so quiet now, where is he? I abhor myself in recollection these pebbles in my hand these …
why won’t he take the bread I leave? Why does he have to shrink back behind the bushes? Is he there or has he vanished?
never to reveal to human ears—
I sit in this cold building and remember, but don’t want to remember. I should pick up a book to distract myself, do something, anything. But what would I be without her hand that visited even as it sickened, and those days in the graveyard, the ways she tried to build me, send me north, how she thought for a while that might protect me. Nameless as I am, wouldn’t I be even more so without those few moments she glimpsed me, and how she didn’t run away, even if, over time, a feeling much like hatred—(call him being not creature)—a feeling she didn’t understand—blended with my face, my voice, my silence, until she burned then turned to glass.
Dr. Bright says I have a tumor of the brain I am very fond of seeing,
he said.
Your friend in truest truth Mary Shelley Yours in Exile, Mary W.
Shelley Believe me your affectionate friend
MWS
Votre Amie tres sincere MS Your very true friend MaryW
Shelley Your Runaway Dormouse
MS
Believe me ever Ys—MWS.—
(Maie’s not well … Maie continues to feel unwell)
If, as Giordano Bruno wrote, we can know the world only through its traces (he was burned at the stake for what he thought) then I know it partly from the trace of her hand that came and went without warning, and when young left chocolate, hunks of bread.
There was so much I couldn’t touch, so many ways I couldn’t bear to touch.
“Matter has the capacity to be other than in actuality it is,” Giordano Bruno wrote. Yet I sit here in this horrid body.