me even as I write you. Something lost inside me & I don’t know how to say it. Sometimes I’m not even affraid anymore as if I’m looking at myself from a great distance and so feel no need to be concerned. Everything over-with in a way. I try to speak plainly but understanding obscures and buries itself. I wonder if you feel this too, though you’re not like me, you’re bold, and I’m sure Mary and Shelley think me timid and a laughingstock, Mamma has told me so. The Creator shouldn’t destroy his Creature but he does this all the time—I shouldn’t dwell on such things and I do, but that doesn’t mean I’m foolish. I don’t know what I am … The other day Mr. Blood, brother of Fanny Blood, stopped by to see us. He gave me many particulars of the days of my mother’s youth before Godwin. He hadn’t been in London for 26 years. How can the world feel so desolate and deserted when it’s so full? For a few hours I felt as though my mother was with me, as she had been with Fanny Blood in Lisbon in those few days before Fanny died after childbirth. I felt such happiness, so strange to feel happy … I know you think Papa is cold, but he just seems that way as he worries about money. I can assure you he speaks of you with kindness and interest. Ever since Mt. Tamboro erupted it seems the whole world has grown cold. Dust everywhere blocking the sun. And such rainstorms and hail. They say the harvest will fail, that there’ll be food shortages, maybe even famine. I’m not sure where you are—in France? In Switzerland? You say you are too intolerant to enter into society but it seems to me you’re always going about, whereas I live in a solitude that… but I can’t explain myself, and I wonder if the famine will come and where you’ll be. Why does the mind grow ashamed of itself? I’m affraid you will dislike this letter, I’ve been rambling, but I write to you without disguise. Your Sister, Fanny
If I could see Claire’s face I might know what she feels. But I see only her hands folding the letter. I don’t know where she is, what year it is, how much time has passed since she last wrote. It seems she’s not in Lisbourne anymore, has traveled.
Nansen wanted his ship to get trapped by ice far out at sea, so when the ice drifted northward or even south it would be dragged to places no man had ever seen. I have no ship, this ice can’t carry me. Yet I feel I’ve reached the farthest pole. No faces anywhere. Only the mind’s isolate and perpetual movement—Ambiguity, silence, instability, exposure—
Dear Fanny,
It’s rained almost every day and there are violent storms. We stay indoors for many hours writing stories. Mary says she cant think of an idea for hers but that’s not true, I see her filling pages. I don’t know what kind of thoughts to send you. Montaigne wrote that he hoped to become ashamed of his mind, and you ask in your letter why does the mind grow ashamed of itself, but I don’t want to feel ashamed of my own mind. I want thinking to be free even if hunted by calamity, even if at times it makes of me a violent, desperate creature. Montaigne thought by withdrawing to live in complete solitude he could set his mind free. But his thinking couldn’t steady itself, it became like a runaway horse, that’s what he said. It presented him with thoughts “irregular and unmeaning.” “I put them on paper,” he wrote, “hoping in time to make my mind ashamed of itself.” I wonder, did he really believe this?—or did he love his runaway horse more than anything. His books all runaway horses, the fraught and unstable extremity of sight… Didn’t he love, in a way, thinking about Bertrand du Guesclin, who died at the siege of the castle of Randon, and how after, when his men had been defeated, they were forced to carry the citadel’s keys on the dead man’s body. Or of the uses of thumbs and why they are cut off. Or of Cannibals and Monsters, “this child just fourteen months old with a single head and double body, diverse limbs hanging and dangling.” “What we call monsters are not so to God, who sees in