Dear John Keats (1795-1821),

Reading of your fists—how they sprang up from your sides and into the fray as fast and naturally as your tears—I wish I were that usher you saw bullying your brother Tom at the play. Bolt out of your seat again and come at me now, you five-foot passion, you fighter's pure verb. I would stand there in the aisle and take your punch full in the face, watch your knuckles go white against my cheek when you connect, feel the blood panic up into my eye to swell it shut. There is nothing I wouldn't give to run back home through rainy old London with a blue-black inkstain around that eye, for I would grab the sidewalk gawkers by the arm, saying, "Go ahead, touch it, this comes from the right hand of John Keats, to whom brawling is meat and drink!" Not a hand to be shaken, not extended in greeting—there is no time for that—but the bare speech of the boxer lunging over and over again. And every last blow lands, and every beat of our pulse batters back, shouting, "Twenty-five years is all this man had, and just look at him swing!"

Who would know by your handsome face, those placid plaster masks you left behind, how your features used to flare like a packet of struck matches? When the doctors opened you up they could hardly find a trace of lungs, so utterly were the organs wasted away. How did you ever begin to breathe at such a pitch, when every distress you witnessed—distresses of pain, yes, but also the distress of each impossibly fragile beauty—became the push and pull of the saw-blade's teeth on the trunk, and you, a leaf quivering on the topmost branch? Through that slender stem ran the thick sap of the root.

In Rome, on your birthday, I walked over a river that was fifteen feet above its banks, higher even than the trees that lined the boardwalk. The stampede of currents wrinkled and folded upon themselves as sounds must in the vision of a bat. I kept walking, bought roses at a shop, went to your grave and laid them on it. I said your poems out loud and heard them flap off like starlings to roost in the tall pines. I sat down cross-legged and cried out of pounding physical pain, running my eyes back and forth across the only line on that stone that matters: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water."

Yours so truly,

Henry Walters

***

Dear Shelby Foote (1916-2005),

It is an irony of literary history that a writer so well read and so gifted is perhaps better known for a television series and a friendship than for his own accomplished writing. The Civil War: A Narrative, your grand summation of America's most tragic conflict, was both magisterial and entertaining; your novel Love in a Dry Season was touching in its intimacy and jarring in its violence; and Shiloh, your best known novel, stands as one of the most thoroughly-researched and engaging works written about the Civil War. And yet your reputation ultimately depended less on this solid corpus than on your guest appearances in Ken Burns's series The Civil War and your kindly relationship with fellow Southern writer Walker Percy.

Perhaps, however, this is not so tragic a fate. In both roles—as narrator in Ken Burns's epic series, as committed correspondent with your best friend—you revealed a truly personal dimension that struck a chord with viewers and readers alike. Whether it was reliving animated discussion with Walker Percy or describing your deep intimacy with Remembrance of Things Past, you allowed the American public a rare glimpse into the private life of a man of letters. Your folksy, singsong voice, your erudition constantly tempered by humility, your candor and your comedic touch—all came through and revealed a man that was both gentleman and scholar.

Much of your work cut through the cant and revealed what life during the Civil War so often was: nasty, brutish, and short. Despite this aversion for sentimentality, please forgive me when I say I hope you now have the luxury to absorb Proust and argue with Walker Percy for a long, long time.

Sincerely,

Anthony Domestico

***

Dear John Knowles (1926-2001),

Once, an Exeter boy jiggled his knees in a tree and the entire world fell apart.

When you wrote A Separate Peace you showed us a terrible smallness that lurks within every human heart. It began with sarcasm and envy and fear, and ended with war and death and friendship betrayed. I think the story of Gene and Finny is so sad partly because we all see ourselves in Gene and his black, creeping desire to commit the ultimate crime. It's hard to be big enough to admire instead of envy, to love instead of resent, to trust in goodness instead of trying to stain it with our own flaws.

If there were a Finny walking among us today, writing "It's complicated with Gene Forrester" on his Facebook profile, skipping section to play blitzball, and exhorting his blockmates to jump nightly into the infamously dirty Charles, we might not take him seriously at all. Like Gene, we might be too bound by our own limitations to see his simple greatness of character. We might pause on our way off the highest branch and jiggle our knees, just slightly, just enough to destroy something beautiful.

Sincerely,

Kristen Tracey

***

Dear Jacques Derrida (1930-2004),

I write this in a language neither yours nor mine. Your mother tongue was French; mine is Polish. The tongue I use now is thus an idiom of my idiom, which you will translate in your head into a third idiom which is neither yours nor mine, and is used for the benefit of the people reading this, and who consider it theirs.

Of course, you claimed French was never your language, and my English and Polish are too commingled to make me strictly Anglophone or Polophone or even polyphone, in my idiolectal monophony. So perhaps these musings on idiom make no difference. Pardon me, différance.

Language-less as you and I are by our very excess of languages, it follows that I do not communicate, or rather that what I communicate does not propel forward but rather detours back into myself. If you notice this re-appropriation, you reflect it in your own person by apprehending it and mimicking my thought process, so that our deferrals are akin in their movement but can never meet. Yet their mutually undisclosed secrecy guarantees the under-standing, or standing under, of some signification beneath all this.

Which appears to imply that I could now stop writing, and I would if it were not so much fun, and if I was not sure the people reading this have by now stopped doing so (paradox), or else that they have already gone back to the beginning to see how I got here, so that they are re-reading before reading has quite finished and the letter thus goes on forever, and is ever deferred.

Or else if they follow me, which I thank and commend them for, they have by now realized that this letter cannot in fact be concluded, unless I take the lack of newspaper space as an excuse to stop writing, which I am actually willing to do.

I hope this made you laugh.

Marta Figlerowicz