Letter II

Thank you for sharing with me such a peculiar series. Kafka an insurance officer? Wallace Stevens an executive? T. S. Eliot a banker? Chekhov a doctor? Coetzee a programmer? I went on to discover that when Stevens won the Pulitzer, it came as a shock to the employees of Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. Stevens? Poetry? Pulitzer?

I admire your disdain for bitterness, your apathy for validation, for admiration. A consequence, no doubt, of the raging furnace that bakes your inners to an unsightly crisp. An agony which you suffer in peace. What the blaze scorches gives way to an emptiness, a coldness, a remoteness that I, only now, understand is the bedrock of your character and the essence of your beauty. You decant pain into your soul as readily as you do pleasure.

Now I understand. Now that I am closer.