"Dear Leonard. To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face and to know it for what it is. At last to know it, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away. Leonard, always the years between us, always the years. Always the love. Always the hours." ~ Virginia Woolf, The Hours

"I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier 'til this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that — everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.

V."

Just watched The Hours again. How I love that film and the performances and the music! I love how when Ed Harris' character throws himself out of the window, he says the same last line to Meryl Streep's character as Virginia Woolf wrote in her suicide note to her husband Leonard. I think though it is essentially a sad film about the three women so wonderfully played by Nicole Kidman, Juliane Moore and Streep, about their struggle, illness and family problems, I do think love plays an important part. It's somewhere there in the haunting atmosphere, in the beautiful music, in their grief...it makes your heart swell up while watching.

Though it's awful when people die young, today being the 70th birthday of John Lennon who passed away at 40; I somehow think that they would have had it in no other way. "Only the good die young." Woolf's stories made so much sense because you can see parallels in her life with them. The fact that she died, and that Septimus Smith died and everything else, it's all part of a bigger picture. I genuinely love her relationship with her husband Leonard and this letter shows that so clearly.