Status Updates From The Letters of Emily Dickinson

Reading ED is like being confronted with Ingenuity itself… I make myself slow to fully appreciate her ability to render incomplete all the incompleteness subjectivity Bestows. I can’t decide if I’m obsessed or merely attuned to ED’s particulars.

“Cousin Pliny says he ‘might stay around a month, visiting old acquaintances – if it were’nt for his business.’
Fortunate for us indeed, that his business feels the need of him, or I think he would never go. He is kind of a compound of [names of three men], so you will easily guess how much we enjoy his society.“

“. . . I think of the grave very often, and how much it has got of mine, and whether I can ever stop it from carrying off what I love; that makes me sometimes speak of it, when I dont intend.”

“Bye and bye, we’ll be all gone, Jennie, does it seem as if we would? The other day I tried to think how I should look with my eyes shut, and a little white gown on, and a snow-drop on my breast; and I fancied I heard the neighbors stealing in so softly, to look down in my face – so fast asleep – so still – Oh Jennie, will you and I really become like this?”

“Who loves you most, and loves you best, and thinks of you when others rest? T’is Emilie —“

“. . . in thinking of those I love, my reason is all gone from me, and I do fear sometimes that I must make a hospital for the hopelessly insane, and chain me up there such times, so I won’t injure you.”

“Vinnie thinks me quite savage, and frequently suggests the propriety of having me transported to some barbarous country, where I may meet with those of a similar nature, and allow her to spend her days – that is, such small remainder as my inhumanity spares – in comparative ease and quietness! She thinks ancient martyrs is very trifling indeed and would welcome the stake and preference to the sunrise . . .”

“I can think of nothing funnier than for intelligent beings to bid the world good night, and go out with their candles, and there’s nothing that I enjoy more than rousing these selfsame beings and witnessing their discomfiture at the bare idea of morning, when they’re so sleepy yet!”

“I know it would make you laugh to see Vinnie sleeping as soundly as a poker, and shovel and pair of tongs, and Cousin Emily Norcross bringing up the rear, in a sleep twice as sound, and full twice as sonorous, and there comes snatches of music from away in mother’s room, which wake a funny response in my amused being.”

“Oh what a house of grief must be theirs today — the grass not growing green above the grave of Martha, before little Ellen is laid close beside — I dont know but they are the happier, and we who longer stay the more to be sorrowed for.”