1 Aug 1921

1 August 1921

Chalet des Sapins, Montana-sur-Sierre, Switzerland

Dearest Brett
Forgive this paper. I am at the top of the house & there is no other here. I am on the side balcony which leads out of my dressing room. Its early evening. All the tree tops are burnished gold, a light wind rocks in the branches. The mountains across the wide valley are still in sunlight. On the remote snowy peaks there are small cloud drifts — silvery. What I love to watch, what seems to become part of this vision, though, are the deep sharp shadows in the ravines & stretching across the slopes. But one could not imagine a more marvellous view or one more perfect to live by. I watch it from early morning until late night when bats are out & booming moths fly for ones hair. With intervals . . .
  While you feel I am in any way a kindred spirit - write to me. A kindred spirit reads your letters; that you may be sure of. That scene in the summerhouse went to my heart. What a big blundering callous world it is! Its no good saying they know not what they do; it doesn't stop them doing it. And it is bad bad - or so I feel - that one should have to shrink from human beings as one has to in such circumstances. Its a kind of suffering which (if you know what I mean) ones real positive nature rebels at and rejects, and so, as well as everything else one has ones own poor self to hush and comfort and sing lullaby to . . .

[To Dorothy Brett in Collected Letters, 4 August, 1921.]