Goodnight, my little ghost.
Joan Didion once said, “…a single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.”
These greats found themselves in those empty worlds - on opposite sides of the world from the loves of their lives, sans TikTok and Zoom and commercial air flights.
They put pen to paper and wrote into eternity their love and lust and longings.
We’ve found our favourite love letters ever written to share them with you this Valentine’s Day.
Leonard Cohen to Marianne Ihlen
‘I must see again what happens to us when we are together, perhaps it will be nothing, perhaps everything. Anyhow, we shall see and speak and touch and if it is nothing we shall say so. If it is nothing I’ll get on with my life and you with yours and all we’ll keep of one another will be a few months of sun and a long journey north. At least we will be able to say goodbye, something we have never managed.’
Oscar Wilde to Philip M. Griffiths
‘I have sent a photograph of myself for you to the care of Mr. MacKay, which I hope you will like, and, in return for it, you are to send me one of yourself, which I will keep as a memory of a charming meeting, and golden hours passed together. You have a nature made to love all beautiful things, and I hope we shall see each other soon. My Own Boy, Your sonnet is quite lovely, and it is a marvel that those red-rose leaf lips of yours should be made no less for the madness of music and song than for the madness of kissing. Your slim gilt soul walks between passion and poetry. Your friend Oscar Wilde.’
I don’t want to live – I want to love first, and live incidentally. – Zelda Fitzgerald
Zelda Fitzgerald to F Scott Fitzgerald
‘Darling – I love these velvet nights. I’ve never been able to decide … whether I love you most in the eternal classic half-lights where it blends with day or in the full religious fan-fare of mid-night or perhaps in the lux of noon. Anyway, I love you most and you ’phoned me just because you phoned me tonight – I walked on those telephone wires for two hours after holding your love like a parasol to balance me.’
Napoleon Bonaparte to Joséphine de Beauharnais
‘Sweet and matchless Josephine, how strangely you work upon my heart.The charms of the incomparable Josephine kindle continually a burning and a glowing flame in my heart…. I thought that I loved you months ago, but since my separation from you I feel that I love you a thousand fold more. Each day since I knew you, have I adored you more and more.You start at midday: in three hours I shall see you again. Till then, a thousand kisses, mio dolce amor! But give me none back for they set my blood on fire.’
Kurt Cobain to Courtney Love
‘I really do care but I’m not very convincing’
Georgia O'Keeffe to Alfred Stieglitz
‘Dearest — my body is simply crazy with wanting you — If you don't come tomorrow — I don't see how I can wait for you — I wonder if your body wants mine the way mine wants yours — the kisses — the hotness — the wetness — all melting together — the being held so tight that it hurts — the strangle and the struggle.’
