Are Mum and Magda back yet? If they are, give them our love. And love to you too. We're both well.
Wouldn't you like to come and visit us? A few famous people have been here already, singers mostly. They share our views. You could talk to the people too and let them know you agree with us and that Jesus, if he only had the slightest idea about nuclear power stations, would be here with us too.
So write to us soon. And pay us a visit. You can sleep in our tent.
Marek
Dearest Bára,
Last night was unusually hot. I couldn't get to sleep, so I got dressed again and went out into the garden and looked at the stars. My son looks at them almost every evening whenever he's at home and then asks me questions to try and catch me out. You tried to do the same about the size of the universe. Yes, there are distances that are unimaginable and insuperable, but I was always more interested in the distances that separate people, distances that are infinitesimal compared to the universe but which often seem equally insuperable.
You write lovely things about me, I've told you not to more than once, and you write beautiful things about love. I agree with you, even though I am frightened of what has happened and is happening — between us. At the same time, I am grateful for what happened and is happening. I sense the possibility of a great love between us and through it the intimacy I have
yearned for, something I experienced or started to experience with my first wife, but which I only associated with her. I had stopped believing that I could ever experience anything similar ever again. Have I the right? Have we the right?
Even though I ask these questions, I am grateful to you for the short time you have been in my life. And that gratitude remains, though I shudder to say it. You write 'nothing that I want to last ever lasts more than a few moments'. It strikes me, on the contrary, that if people so desire there is no such thing as 'nothing ever', that it is something that only death can say, and not even death need say it precisely the way you feel it. But human folly is capable of anticipating death by entire decades. Often 'nothing ever' is something we create for ourselves, through our weakness, selfishness, or ignorance. Or our desperation.
What are we going to do?
I also want to let you know that you are a special, exceptional individual. You have a greater yearning for love and wholeness than I have ever encountered in another human being. I feel near despair because what there is between us can never be whole. Or can it? What would we have to abandon for it to be so? How many people would we have to hurt?
And so we lurch, you and I, between a yearning for completeness and the anxiety of 'never ever'. It's a very imperfect situation and therefore very human.
I feel an enormous love for you. I couldn't recant it at this moment, even if I tried.
Love, Dan
Dear Reverend,
I apologize deeply to you for all the bad things I have done. I only told you all those things the time I got drunk because I was miserable, because I had to move out of my sister's. It's not true that I could be a dealer. It's just that I need to earn more money because that's the way things are nowadays. I am now searching for the truth. About life and about the Lord Jesus, because I've found out that everyone sees him differently. Such as the Jehovah's Witnesses or the Roman Catholics. The way they honour the Virgin
Mary, for instance. The other day one of their priests gave me a leaflet with a prayer by St Louis which actually states: it is thy privilege to hold absolute sway over angels, men and demons; it is thy privilege to dispose of all the gifts of God, just as thou wiliest. What do you say about that, Reverend? Isn't it almost blasphemy against the Lord? Or take the Pentecostals. They maintain that everything of any importance comes from the Holy Spirit and we have to believe in its power and not yield to Satan. That seems to me right, because the Holy Spirit was poured out on the apostles, after all. I'd also like to ask your forgiveness, Reverend, over Eva. I didn't mean her any harm. I just wanted to get her out of the clutches of those rotten speed dealers. Marijuana doesn't do you any harm. Reverend. But I ought to have talked to you first, and so I now beg you for forgiveness.
I prayed that you and the Lord God will forgive me.
Yours, Petr
Darling Dan,
I don't know what I'm to do with you. A double life destroys one, unless one totally abandons the need to be a complete whole. Forgive me. Forgive me for destroying you. But unless one gives up the need for love, I suppose there is nothing for it, in certain situations, but to lead a double life. In today's world, at least, and with our morality. One can fool the brain, but not the heart. The heart is a compass, you know that, don't you? You know how to read it. From the very beginning, from the first moment I heard you, I knew I could trust you, that I could place my head in your jaws and be sure that you would not harm me. Taking a chance with you is not just placing my head in your jaws, it's also needing completeness without an escape route. But I'm leaving myself an escape route anyway: the way home, back to my husband and my sons. Except that my home is also a place of peril. I'm constantly on my guard here and there is no loving embrace for me. Instead there is a man who demands my embrace while keeping his arms behind his back. Admittedly I try to accommodate him. I look cheerful and smile, but deep down inside me something that can never be renewed is being burnt away. There is something dead inside me, somethjng I can't bring back to life. My cheerfulness here is awfully superficial, I feel it and so does Sam who is always complaining about me. He distrusts me and suffocates me. I can't get closer to him and I can't
leave him. I am stuck here and I'm unhappy. The atmosphere here is not one of blissful ignorance that conceals everything. It is an awareness of ruin. It destroys me because I need joy for my life to have meaning. I don't want to live without joy and without love. I'd sooner not live at all. I don't want my life to be merely a succession of duties. I don't want to save the world with duties but with joy. I long to leave, to disappear, to turn my back on everything, free myself, dissolve, be no longer. I talk about myself as if I didn't think about the others. In my daily life I constantly have to think about others, I have no time to remember myself. It's thinking about you that has made me remember myself. When I'm with you I feel that I may think about myself too. You are someone who doesn't intimidate me, or blackmail me, threaten me or ridicule my craziness. You're someone who really loves me, not because I'm particularly worthy of love but because you're overflowing with it. I feel an enormous gratitude towards you. I have never really encountered anything like you.
And now I feel like crying because you're somewhere far away, all too far away. I don't have you near me as my salvation, my dearest of all men, my real man, the one I trust, the one who won't let me perish, to whom I can admit to being weak, incapable and pathetic and yet he won't reject me.
And now I lament that I have found the kind-hearted man I longed for and he is not for me, won't ever be for me. I know it. I have found that man and can thank God that he let me know you at all.
It surprises you that I write about God and you think I'm doing it to ingratiate myself with you. But I don't want to go against the Ten Commandments. I understand them and respect them — apart from the one about not coveting my neighbour's husband. I understand that life requires order and that morality is good so long as it is not hypocrisy.