I'm Not Impatient, I'm Just Desperate

February 06, 2004

I'm Not Impatient, I'm Just Desperate

Words that make Valentine's a red-letter day
by Mary Schmich
Published February 6, 2004

Someone recently sent me a book called "The 50 Greatest Love Letters of All Time." From these letters, compiled by David H. Lowenherz, I've deduced many things about the tricky art of expressing love and longing. And here on the cusp of Valentine's Day, to inspire all those with love-letter writer's block, I'd like to share the pointers I've extrapolated from the love scrawls of the famous.

Tip: Call the loved one absurdly cutesy names.

Here's Wolfgang Mozart to Constanze Mozart: "Dearest little wife . . . ! If I were to tell you all the things I do with your dear portrait, I think that you would often laugh. For instance, when I take it out of its case, I say, `Good day, Stanzerl! Good-day, little rascal, pussy-pussy, little turned up nose, little bagatelle, Schluck and Druck."

Tip: Make Chicago sound sexier than Paris.

Here's Simone de Beauvoir to Nelson Algren: "My Precious beloved Chicago man, I think of you in Paris, in Paris I miss you . . . I hoped the beauty of Paris would help me to get over my sadness but it did not. First, Paris is not beautiful today. Maybe it is my heart which is dead to Paris. My heart is yet . . . in my Chicago home, in my own warm place against your loving heart."

Tip: Tell the beloved that he/she is even more attractive than someone really attractive.

Here's Harry Truman to Bess Wallace: "French girls are pretty and chic but they cannot hold a candle to American girls."

Tip: Superlatives are the absolutely best way to win a heart.

From Khalil Gibran to Mary Haskell: "My knowing you is the greatest thing in my days and nights, a miracle quite outside the natural order of things . . . Your understanding of me is the most peaceful freedom I have known."

Tip: Wrap a criticism in wit and a compliment.
Here's Ben Franklin to Madame Brillon: "What a difference, my dear friend, between you and me! You find innumerable faults in me, whereas I see only one fault in you (but perhaps it is the fault of my glasses). I mean this kind of avarice which leads you to seek a monopoly on all my affections."

Another tip: Turn incompatibility into proof of the transcendent passion between two superior persons.

Here's Jack London to Anna Strunsky: "The one gleam of sanity through it all is that we are both large temperamentally, large enough to often understand. True, we often understand but in vague glimmering ways, by dim perceptions, like ghosts, which, while we doubt, haunt us with their truth . . . Large temperamentally--that is it. It is the one thing that brings us at all in touch. We have, flashed through us, you and I, each a bit of universal, and so we draw together. And yet we are so different."

And another tip: Don't worry about being comprehensible. Just make sure the passion's clear.Tip: Use desperation as seduction. From Ernest Hemingway to Mary Walsh: "Please write me Pickle . . . If anything happened to you I'd die the way an animal will die in the Zoo if something happens to his mate . . . know I'm not impatient. I'm just desperate."

Tip: If desperation doesn't work, humiliate yourself. Zelda Fitzgerald to Scott Fitzgerald: "If you hated me and were covered with sores like a leper--if you ran away with another woman and starved me and beat me--I still would want you."

Tip: Flatter the beloved's letter-writing. From Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf: "I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone; I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your undumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn't even feel it."

From this book, I discovered other tricks as well: Let the beloved know that only higher duty (e.g., war) would separate the two of you. Compare the beloved's body parts to a natural wonder. Mention foreign cities. The word "eternity" is good. Better yet is "pain."

Posted on February 06, 2004 at 01:46 PM | Permalink