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Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Epistolary Desire

  
From Leslie Kathleen Hankins, Orlando: "A Precipice Marked V" Between "A Miracle of Discretion" and "Lovemaking Unbelievable: Indiscretions Incredible"

Vita's introduction to Passenger to Teheran theorizes about epistolary desire, telling what is wrong with letters and how to write and read them, focusing on their role in stimulating and fulfilling desire.

Arguing that "there is something intrinsically wrong about letters," she notes that "they are not instantaneous" and that "they do not arrive often enough." Her descriptions of letters teasingly suggest lovemaking and multiple orgasms: "A letter which has been passionately awaited should be immediately supplemented by another one, to counteract the feelings of flatness that comes upon us when the agonizing delights of anticipation have been replaced by the colder flood of fulfillment" (Passenger 9-10).


From Vita Sackville-West, Passenger to Teheran

For weeks we have waited; every day has dawned in hope (except Sunday, and that is a day to be blacked out of the calendar); it may have waned in disappointment, but the morrow will soon be here, and who knows what to-morrow’s post may not bring? Then at last it comes; is torn open; devoured;-and all is over. It is gone in a flash, and it has not sufficed to feed our hunger.

For a letter, by its arrival, defrauds us of a whole secret region of our existence, the only region indeed in which the true pleasure of life may be tasted, the region of imagination, creative and protean, the clouds and beautiful shapes of whose heaven are destroyed by the wind of reality. For observe, that to hope for Paradise is to live in Paradise, a very different thing from actually getting there. (Passenger 10)


Wild geese in flight:
 multiple "Vs" in the sky
 = V(irginia) W(oolf) signature
 = V(irginia) and V(ita) 
 = proposal of elopement

好玩好玩:D

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1 comment:

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