Theme

Last letters

The page written as if there will not be another. Sometimes there was not.

• England and Rome, 1819 to 1821

  Two Luxuries

  John Keats writes to Fanny Brawne of her loveliness and of the hour of his death. The first is the love. The second is a fact he could not bargain with.

• Twelfth-century Paris

  Héloïse Will Not Be a Plot

  A teacher, a student, a secret marriage, then a mutilation. The Latin that survives is not a romance. It is her refusal to let desire be converted into a useful wound.

• High Roman Empire

  The Empty Threshold

  She is in Campania for her health. He rereads her letters, walks to the room where she sat, and writes as if the wax could keep her. Her side of the correspondence does not survive.

• Washington, July 1861

  If I Do Not Return

  A week before First Bull Run, Major Sullivan Ballou writes to Sarah. The letter became famous. The war was not beautiful, and the famous text may not be the one his hand first made.

• Teplitz, July 1812

  Unsterbliche Geliebte

  In July 1812 Beethoven writes, in pencil, to a woman he calls immortal. The letter stays with him. Her name does not.