Her hand still leaving fragments from a life I could barely understand:
those heavy hours but I have nothing
Dear Sir I am in great want of a book which describes minutely the Environs of Constantinople
and shut out as I am
I am impatient for the papers I mentioned. I wish particularly also for my two journal books—(one a green covered book & the other a little one bound with red leather). I shall not be easy until
Walk out—work—S comes down on friday evening
3
4 10
1–19
5
3–15
2–19–9
1–11–116
3
2 6
75
5 “5
I
–
10
Unable to endure the aspect of the I had created
He then took me into his and showed explained to me his various machines
Teusday 26th—Walk—read Pamela—Shelley reads Gibbon—in the evening S goes out to take a little walk and loses—himself—
Clary in an ill humour—Shelley sits up & talks her into reason
I felt great relief in studying with my friend Clerval, and found not only instruction but consolation in the works of the orientalists. Their melancholy is soothing, and their joy elevating to a degree I never experienced in studying the authors of any other country.
So the days passed. My reading the words she left so briefly in the air before me.
William, There’s a dream I meant to tell you—I was in Lisbon, Fanny Blood and her baby had just died. The walls were covered with her botanical drawings, plants from England—She’d wanted to draw the plants of Lisbon but Mr. Curtis wouldn’t let her—I lay in a white bed next to hers and after a while a nurse came in, handed me my baby. Such a small soft bundle. From the moment I held her I knew she was glass, and that glass had shattered—There were cracks like fault lines all over and through her but the outer form still held—I got up to get help but when I stood I was glass, a broken vase but moving—No one was around it was so quiet I went back to bed, picked her up, held her, looked into her newborn eyes— This is what I want to tell you— There were no cracks no fault lines in the eyes — Whatever it is that’s word-blank in me, word-blind and word-deaf and leaving, I want to say I saw her newborn eyes and nothing stopped them— Nothing hurt or labeled or restrained them—They looked out with such great calm and pleasure—How does the mind move when it no longer moves in word-time?—What was she thinking, she who had no words?
I could see she kept track of everything she read:
1814
Mary. Those marked /—S. has read also
x Letters to Norway
x Mary, a Fiction
x Wordsworth’s Excursion
x Madoc. By Southey. 2 vol
x Curse of Kehama
x Sorcerer. A novel.
x Political Justice
x The Monk—by Lewis—
x Thaliba
x The Empire of the Nairs
x Queen Mab
x St. Godwin
The list broke off, then continued:
1816
Mary
x Park’s Journal of a Journey in Africa
Peregrine Proteus
4 Vols. Of Clarendon’s History
x Modern Philosophers
The Opinions of Different Authors upon the Punishment of Death, selected by Montagu
Erskines speeches
X Caleb Williams
Had she kept lists of what I’d read? Or had she hated all along those rough sounds that broke from my throat?
Claire,
It was wearying controlling him, constructing him but giving him no mouth, no means of speaking, yet I couldn’t stop. I’d feel my own lips harden as I spoke, tendons rigid, constricting in my throat. This was when Robert Owen was pursuing his “experiment in perfectibility”—he believed in fundamental human goodness, but I knew I could never perfect what I was making. He persisted in so many ways mysterious, unyielding. So a slave’s a mystery too, I thought, a slave’s an other unconquered after all. No one owns anyone. I sailed back home on a ship called the Wishart. Thought about that word with all its innocence and bitterness. The allies were entering Paris, claiming liberation. Bonaparte dethroned. One rigid power replacing another. There would be a monarchy again, the restoration of the Bourbons. That same corrupt monarchy my dead mother had despised. How could I dethrone myself without replacing myself with another unjust power? Something merciless in me, unkind, unforgiving, monarchy or not. And he, impoverished, uncompleted, without rights, still strapped on the table. Each night as I built him I made sure to keep him unfinished. As much as I built his flesh how could I even begin to build his thoughts, the private currents of his brain? Those parts of him that knew but wouldn’t speak. England felt strange when I returned, I’d been so long away. Like him, I belonged nowhere,