Take an imaginary letter, Mr. Selig. Harrumph. Miss Kitty Holstein, Something West Sixty-something Street, New York City. Check the address later. Don’t bother about the zipcode.
Dear Kitty:
I know you haven’t heard from me in ages but I think now it’s appropriate to try to get in touch with you again. Thirteen years have passed and a certain maturity must have come over both of us, I think, healing old wounds and making communication possible. Despite all hard feelings that may once have existed between us I never lost my fondness for you, and you remain bright in my mind.
Speaking of my mind, there’s something I ought to tell you. I no longer do things very well with it. By “things” I mean the mental thing, the mindreading trick, which of course I couldn’t do on you in any case, but which defined and shaped my relationship to everybody else in the world. This power seems to be slipping away from me now. It caused us so much grief, remember? It was what ultimately split us up, as I tried to explain in my last letter to you, the one you never answered. In another year or so — who knows, six months, a month, a week? — it will be totally gone and I will be just an ordinary human being, like yourself. I will be a freak no longer. Perhaps then there will be an opportunity for us to resume the relationship that was interrupted in 1963 and to reestablish it on a more realistic footing.
I know I did dumb things then. I pushed you mercilessly. I refused to accept you for yourself, and tried to make something else out of you, something freakish, in fact, something just like myself. I had good reasons in theory for attempting that, I thought then, but of course they were wrong, they had to be wrong, and I never saw that until it was too late. To you I seemed domineering, overpowering, dictatorial — me, mild self-effacing me! Because I was trying to transform you. And eventually I bored you. Of course you were very young then, you were — shall I say it? — shallow, unformed, and you resisted me. But now that we’re both adults we might be able to make a go of it.
I hardly know what my life will be like as an ordinary human being unable to enter minds. Right now I’m floundering, looking for definitions of myself, looking for structures. I’m thinking seriously of entering the Roman Catholic Church. (Good Christ, am I? That’s the first I’ve heard of that! The stink of incense, the mumble of priests, is that what I want?) Or perhaps the Episcopalians, I don’t know. It’s a matter of affiliating myself with the human race. And also I want to fall in love again. I want to be part of someone else. I’ve already begun tentatively, timidly getting in touch with my sister Judith again, after a whole lifetime of warfare; we’re starting to relate to each other for the first time, and that’s encouraging to me. But I need more: a woman to love, not just sexually but in all ways. I’ve really had that only twice in my life, once with you, once about five years later with a girl named Toni who wasn’t very much like you, and both times this power of mine ruined things, once because I got too close with it, once because I couldn’t get close enough. As the power slips away from me, as it dies, perhaps there’s a chance for an ordinary human relationship between us at last, of the kind that ordinary human beings have all the time. For I will be ordinary. For I will be very ordinary.
I wonder about you. You’re 35 years old now, I think. That sounds very old to me, even though I’m 41. (41 doesn’t sound old, somehow!) I still think of you as being 22. You seemed even younger than that: sunny, open, naive. Of course that was my fantasy-image of you; I had nothing to go by but externals, I couldn’t do my usual number on your psyche, and so I made up a Kitty who probably wasn’t the real Kitty at all. Anyway, so you’re 35. I imagine you look younger than that today. Did you marry? Of course you did. A happy marriage? Lots of kids? Are you still married? What’s your married name, then, and where do you live, and how can I find you? If you’re married, will you be able to see me anyway? Somehow I don’t think you’d be a completely faithful wife — does that insult you? — and so there ought to be room in your life for me, as a friend, as a lover. Do you ever see Tom Nyquist? Did you go on seeing him for long, after you and I broke up? Were you bitter toward me for the things I told you about him in that letter? If your marriage has broken up, or if somehow you never married, would you live with me now? Not as a wife, not yet, just as a companion. To help me get through the last phases of what’s happening to me? I need help so much. I need love. I know that’s a lousy way to go about making a proposition, let alone a proposal, that is, saying, Help me, comfort me, stay with me. I’d rather reach to you in strength than in weakness. But right now I’m weak. There’s this globe of silence growing in my head, expanding, expanding, filling my whole skull, creating this big empty place. I’m suffering a slow reality leakage. I can only see the edges of things, not their substance, and now the edges are getting indistinct too. Oh, Christ. Kitty I need you. Kitty how will I find you? Kitty I hardly knew you. Kitty Kitty Kitty.
Twang. The plangent chord. Twing. The breaking string. Twong. The lyre untuned. Twang. Twing. Twong.
Dear children of God, my sermon this morning will be a very short one. I wish only that you should ponder and meditate the deep meaning and mystery of a few lines I intend to rip off the saintly Tom Eliot, a thoughtful guide for troubled times. Beloved, I direct you to his Four Quartets, to his paradoxical line, “In my beginning is my end,” which he amplifies some pages later with the comment, “What we call the beginning is often the end/ And to make an end is to make a beginning.” Some of us are ending right now, dear children; that is to say, aspects of their lives that once were central to them are drawing to a close. Is this an end or is it a beginning? Can the end of one thing not be the beginning of another? I think so, beloved. I think that the closing of a door does not preclude the opening of a different door. Of course, it takes courage to walk through that new door when we do not know what may lie beyond it, but one who has faith in our Lord who died for us, who trusts fully in Him who came for the salvation of man, need have no fears. Our lives are pilgrimages toward Him. We may die small deaths every day, but we are reborn from death to death, until at last we go into the dark, into the vacant interstellar spaces where He awaits us, and why should we fear that, if He is there? And until that time comes let us live our lives without giving way to the temptation to grieve for ourselves. Remember always that the world still is full of wonders, that there are always new quests, that seeming ends are not ends in truth, but only transitions, stations of the way. Why should we mourn? Why should we give ourselves over to sorrow, though our lives be daily subtractions? If we lose this, do we also lose that? If sight goes, does love go also? If feeling grows faint, may we not return to old feelings and draw comfort from them? Much of our pain is mere confusion.