From Memories to Regrets: A Brother's Last Letter

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University of New South Wales *

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HSCADVANCE

Subject

Arts Humanities

Date

Oct 30, 2023

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Pages

Uploaded by DeanCrocodilePerson218

From the Last Living to the Long Lost New draft: February 10th 1841 Hampstead, London To John, my Bright Star Brother, In the last months of my life I find myself left standing alone at the edge of the world, suffering the selfsame pain and disease you did. I feel cold, far, and distant from the warm memories of the lives we once led with our family. Hence I now write this letter to preserve them and have a lengthy conversation with you in an attempt to bring the warmth back. It’s chilly here in Hampstead, but I have access to a serene solitude and time to appreciate the beauty that surrounds me. The snow covered oak trees in the private and pure white landscape are soothing to my eyes. It makes me realise how I was unknowingly burdened with the daily sight of crammed buildings and tiring commerce in America. I desire to leave my mechanical world and traverse through your imagination. My thoughts and affections are taking shape after your ways of life for the only light left in my final moments is from you John, my Bright Star. I wish you could know this. I find myself rewinding the short lived moments we shared in our youth; a bittersweet mix of financial codependency and emotional abandonment. The unfortunate trail of events we endured after father’s passing tested our relationship to its furthest extent, but I would like to believe our bond has remained steadfast in the years since. To be completely honest, it hasn’t been a smooth journey and I'm unfortunately ladened with one significant regret: deciding to leave you for America and believing I could sustain you by doing so. Though I sustained you financially, I failed to protect your health and psyche which I had never known would be left so damaged. If I was there, if I had never left you, and if I was more invested in you than money and Kentucky, you might have survived. The regrets wash over me like recurring tides in the sea of my consciousness, never gone nor buried forever deep. I have faced many such fears in my life, but none were as intimate or more intimidating than the prospects of my own death. However, a close second would be when we both had fears you’d cease to be while we were an ocean apart. Our fears came true. But what is it that we men are to do when we stand head to head with our fears?

There are many answers to this question, and though they are not complete, they are satisfactory. The path we both chose was to learn to step beyond our fears and towards a realm of bliss. I first learnt this 20 years ago, when I last visited your grave at the Cimitero Acattolico in Rome on a fine spring day. The memory retains an odd clarity in my mind. It was early in the morning when I visited your grave and it was there that I had a strange experience. You were not physically there but I felt your presence around me in the violets, daisies, and buttercups that surrounded you in full bloom. Nature spoke to me for the first time. I now carry the vivid colors in my mind that surrounded you to this day; I can strangely associate my incomprehensible emotions to them with ease. The peaceful scenery along with your lengthy letters keeps you alive beside me after spending years away from you on the busy streets of Kentucky. You always had a taste for humor in your letters which, even today, brings me great bliss. One of my personal favourites is the letter you wrote in the September of 1819 as I feel it best summarises you: “ You see I cannot get on without writing as boys do at school a few nonsense verses .” 1 It always reminds me of our boyhood spent in Clarke’s school. You were a lone wanderlust with your poetry, frolicking and fantasizing in the gardens and forest. You had a peculiar fascination with nightingales and their music. You searched for their nests far and beyond. What did you search for? What did you yearn for ? Did you find it? You always had the raw desire and innocence of a child, which you found a place for in your poetry. Your most affectionate brother, George Criteria: 1

Listen this child better get A for this he worked hard.

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