Correspondence

L sends some of the best emails. His words can make me swoon. Here’s one of the awesomest ones for your reading pleasure; on fucking in public at our college, among other things.

Let’s… make this legendary. There shall be a new challenge. Nous nous baiserons to an unprecedented echelon of debauchery. We will set the boundary for all collegiate libertines to set foot in those hallowed halls; a milestone for those Bacchus-led, lustful revelers. We shall make palpable those words spat forth from Hell’s own cartographer, speaking of our model, Egypt’s Semiramis, broken by the carnal: “A vizio di lussuria fu sì rotta/ che libito fé licito in sua legge,/ per tòrre il biasmo in che era condotta.” It is no coincidence that “carnal” and “carnage” derive from the same root; those Latinists fish from a pool of sexual ardor and fleshly anger, their script merely approximations of the fury that trembles around the core of their passions. Our words are reflections of this Greco-Roman obsession; our actions their seductive manifestations. We are art personified. Each thrust an Impressionist stroke melded into a maelstrom of feeling, twisted into a hurricane of fingers and hair and fleeting glances of serious eyes. Through less solemn eyes (which we have always worn), the description rends our hearts asunder, razes the comfort in our bosom, but thrusts us into a crystalline, fiery realm of pure, ecstatic release; a garden, neither Heaven nor Hell, where flora and fauna flaunt broken limbs with fervor, where Venetian fevers whisper themselves into being, giving tremors that were never told…

“La bufera infernal, che mai non resta,/ mena li spirti con la sua rapina;/ voltando e percotendo li molesta.”

And yet it is still said that Jesus wept. He is a sailor, yes, but when we walk on the waves, we sink. How he wishes he could.

Note: Quotes from Dante’s Inferno

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