[New York, January 1882]
Amelia,
My beautiful Amelia, before me, like a rare jewel of soft, pure light, I have your affectionate letter. It conveys your serene, unblemished soul, free of wild impatience. It expresses your tender spirit, which wells forth from you like the essence of the first May flowers. I want you to protect yourself from violent, traitorous winds and hide when you see them go by; like birds of prey in the air, the winds sweep the earth, seeking the essence of the flowers. All the happiness of life, Amelia, lies in not confusing the eagerness to love which you feel at your age with the sovereign, deep, overwhelming love that flowers in your soul only after long examination, the most thorough knowledge and true and prolonged company of the person to whom you entrust your love. In our land, there is a disastrous custom of confusing loving feelings with the decisive, unchangeable affection that leads to a marriage that cannot be dissolved without breaking the hearts of the separated lovers. The man and woman who feel drawn together by their mutual feelings, sometimes born of the budding soul’s eagerness to open itself to the wind and our desire to experience love, rather than of another’s inspiring love in us — instead of such a bachelor’s and maid’s confessing their mutual attraction and differentiating it from love, which should be something else and comes later (if at all) and has no occasion to arise except after marriage, those two relative strangers are forced into an affection that cannot have stemmed from anything except intimate knowledge of each other. Relations of love in our land begin where they should culminate. An intelligent woman with a stern soul should distinguish between the intimate and keen plea sure which comes close to being love but yet falls short of it, which she feels on seeing a man who appears to be worthy of being esteemed, and that other, definitive, magnificent love, which, since it is the ineffable attachment of one spirit to another, is born only of confidence that the spirit to which ours is united is entitled, because of its faithfulness, its beauty and its delicacy, to this tender and worthy consecration, which should last all our lives. See: I am an excellent doctor for souls, and I swear to you, by the little head of my son, that what I am telling you is the key to happiness and that he who forgets my code will not be happy. I have seen much in the depths of others, and much in myself, as well. Learn from what I say. Do not believe, my beautiful Amelia, that the affection depicted in common novels — and there are few novels that are not common, penned as they are by writers who turn out novels precisely because they aren’t capable of writing more enlightening things — is a true copy of life or reflects its precepts. A young woman who sees it written that the love of all the heroines in her books — or that of her friends, who have read them like her — begins suddenly, with a devastating electric shock, supposes, when she feels the first sweet loving feeling, that it is her turn in the human game and that her affection must have the same forms, rapidity and intensity as those light affections depicted in books written — believe me, Amelia — by people who are incapable of resolving the tremendous bitterness that stems from their conventional, unthinking manner of describing passions that don’t exist or which exist in a way different from that which they describe. Do you see a tree? Do you see how long it takes for the thick branch to put forth a golden orange or a red pomegranate? Going deeper in life, you see that everything follows the same process. Love, like the trees, must go from seed to sapling to blossom and to fruit. In Cuba, people always begin with the fruit. Amelia mine, tell me what is in your heart. Tell me everything about the wolves who pass by your door and the winds that seek your fragrance. Accept my help so you will be happy; I cannot be happy myself, but I know how to bring happiness to others.
Don’t think that my letter ends here. I’ve wanted to tell you this for some time, and now I’ve begun to tell it to you. I’ll write you about myself another Thursday. Now, I have only to tell you that I’m going around like my own pilot, facing all the winds of life and bringing a noble and beautiful ship — which has made so many voyages already that it is taking on water — unscathed through difficulties. Ask Papa, who is a worthy sailor, to explain this to you. You don’t know, Amelia mine, how much veneration and tender respect our father deserves. The man whom you see filled with peevishness and whims is a man of extraordinary virtue. Now that I have more experience in life, I have become aware of the full worth of his energy and all of the rare and sublime merits of his pure and frank character. Think about what I am telling you. They’re not just details, made for small eyes. That old man is a magnificent person. Make his life sweeter. Smile at his peevishness. He has never been too old to love.
Now, farewell.
Write me without moderation and without weighing your words; I am not your censor or your examiner, but your brother. A sheet of paper covered with a scrawl that slopes off the page but which expresses the beating of your heart and speaks to me of what you feel without any misgivings or fear is more beautiful to me than a painstaking letter written in fear that it might displease me. Affection is the best and most eloquent of all grammar. Say tenderness! and you are a very eloquent woman.
Nobody has ever given you a better embrace than this one which I send you. Don’t delay in writing.
Your brother,
J. Martí