Dear Friend - We must be less than death to be lessened by it, for nothing is irrevocable but ourselves.
I am glad you are better. I had feared to follow you, lest you would rather be lonely, which is the will of sorrow; but the papers had spoken of you with affectionate deference, and to know you were deeply remembered might not too intrude.
To be human is more than to be divine, for when Christ was divine he was uncontented till he had been human.
I remember nothing so strong as to see you...
Do not try to be saved, but let redemption find you, as it certainly will. Love is it's own rescue, for we, at our supremest, are but it's trembling emblems.
Your Scholar
[ED to Col. Higginson, 1877]

http://www.emilydickinson.it/indlett.html

"Gertrude Stein...reached in words for new vision formed from the process of naming, as if a first woman were sounding, not describing, "space of time filled with moving." Repetition, surprise, alliteration, odd rhyme and rhythm, dislocation, deconstruction. To restore the original clarity of each word-skeleton both women..." [SH, My ED, 11]
there never was clarity, still it is a matter of recovery, something has, indeed, been lost, but what, how- ahistorically?

"Yes, a gender difference does affect our use of language, and we constantly confront issues of difference, distance, and absence, when we write. That doesn't mean I can relegate to women what we "should" or "must" be doing. Orders suggest hierarchy and category. Categories and hierarchies suggest property. My voice formed from my life belongs to no one else. What I put into words is no longer my possession. Possibility has opened." [SH, My ED, 13]

"Isolation in nineteenth century England and America was spelled the same way, but there the resemblance stopped. Poe, Melville, and Dickinson all knew the falseness of comparing. Stevens and Olson later- the boundless westwardness of everything. Ancestral theme of children flung out into memory unknown." [SH, My ED, 20]
"This is the process of viewing Emptiness without design or plan, neighborless in winter blank, or blaze of summer. This is waste wilderness. Nature no soothing mother, Nature is annihilation brooding over." [SH, My ED, 21]

"Dislocation first rends the seeking soul. Splendor is subversive to the Collective will. In the eye of the present, fragments of past presents. My presence keeps a promise to past meanings." [SH, My ED, 54]

"Out of America's text-free past..." [SH, My ED 97]

"A Poet's words like the sun against glass, may recoil false meaning back on herself, artificial definition, that smears true light with antic reflection. The end of a poem, like the end of a life, releases language into the sovereignty of abdication." [SH, My ED, 134]

"In a universe identified with Absence, the forbidden territory between man, woman, and God, has torn love from the world. Love waits outside beyond remembrance or caring. If the Goddess of Death was unfamiliar, so was a masculine Father who required Obedience without question. Both women [Emily Dickinson, Emily Brontë] resisted such domineering demands for submission and the resisted comfort and confidence." [SH, My ED, 135]

"Who is knower, who known- sure opinion will surely break down. Sadism knocks down barriers between an isolate soul and others. Violence forces reaction. That unity of souls may be linked to sadism is the sad riddle of the world." [SH, My ED, 136]

"Time, why, Time was all I wanted!" [SH quoting ED quoting Browning, My ED, 138]