Forsake your fear, and do what you believe is right, and what your heart desires. Courage is not the absence of fear, but the will to act in spite of it.

And the Band Played Waltzing Mathilda

"What happiness it is to love one woman only! This is both a heartfelt expression and the result of reasoning and observation; for I can analyse you with the most perfect coolness, and I perceive with glad conviction that no one else can be compared to you. I know not in the world such another perfect intelligence, a more noble heart, a more sweet and charming temper, a more upright character, a sounder judgment, nor anyone who is so wise and reasonable."

"...You must believe me when I say that even yet, after all these years, I have not become accustomed to knowing you. Centuries would not suffice, and life is so short! You saw the fact in those two months. I was in the same state of ecstasy and bewilderment when I went away as I was the first day I beheld you."

-- Honoré de Balzac, to Countess Ewelina Hanska

"I love you more than it is possible to imagine...all my moments are consecrated to you...to think of any other woman has never entered my head--they are all in my eyes without grace, wit, or beauty...you, you alone, such as I see you, such as you are, can please me."

Napoleon, to his wife, Josephine

"Put my passion under the utmost restraint, send me as distant from you as the earth will allow, yet you cannot banish those charming ideas which will ever stick by me whilst I have the use of memory. Nor is the love I bear you only seated in my soul, for there is not a single atom of my frame that is not blended with it; therefore don't flatter yourself that separation will ever change my sentiments, for I find myself unquiet in the midst of silence, and my heart at once pierced with sorrow and love."

-- Hester Vanhomrigh, from a letter to Jonathan Swift

I love your name: it's my favorite word. When I hear it, my heart leaps. When I see it, I feel a ray of bittersweet joy touch me, like a sunray peeking through the clouds. I'll be sitting while the credits roll from a movie, not even really watching; but your name will flash out at me, and I'll feel like I've touched something good and lovely.

And wouldn't your first name be beautiful paired with my last name?

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wand’ring bark,

Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle’s compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

-- Shakespeare

Tolstoy and Tolkien on Transcendence

It's strange that I should come to this now, just after I tried to express to you how your music affects me and what it means to me. But I no longer question these coincidences nor am I even surprised by them anymore.

Have you read War and Peace? I'm reading it now, after having long put it off.

There's a scene in which young Nicholas Rostov comes home after his 'friend' has tricked him into running up a very large debt to him at cards, out of revenge and jealousy, because Nicholas has love and he does not. Nicholas is despondent and in despair to the point of suicidal thoughts, believing himself ruined and dishonored.

When he comes home, he finds his pretty young sister and cousin singing  with their friend, and at first he can't understand how there can still be joy in the world when all is in ruins. But then his sister sings alone, and he is transported to a place above all such petty concerns, and transcends them:

Having lifted her head and let her arms droop lifelessly, as ballet dancers do, Natasha, rising energetically from her heels to her toes, stepped to the middle of the room and stood still.

"Yes, that's me!" she seemed to say, answering the rapt gaze with which Denisov followed her.

"And what is she so pleased about?" thought Nicholas, looking at his sister. "Why isn't she dull and ashamed?"

Natasha took the first note, her throat swelled, her chest rose, her eyes became serious. At that moment she was oblivious of her surroundings, and from her smiling lips flowed sounds which anyone may produce at the same intervals and hold for the same time, but which leave you cold a thousand times and the thousand and first time thrill you and make you weep.

Natasha, that winter, had for the first time begun to sing seriously, mainly because Denisov so delighted in her singing. She no longer sang as a child, there was no longer in her singing that comical, childish, painstaking effect that had been in it before; but she did not yet sing well, as all the connoisseurs who heard her said: "It is not trained, but it is a beautiful voice that must be trained." Only they generally said this some time after she had finished singing. While that untrained voice, with its incorrect breathing and labored transitions, was sounding, even the connoisseurs said nothing, but only delighted in it and wished to hear it again. In her voice there was a virginal freshness, an unconsciousness of her own powers, and an as yet untrained velvety softness, which so mingled with her lack of art in singing that it seemed as if nothing in that voice could be altered without spoiling it.

"What is this?" thought Nicholas, listening to her with widely opened eyes. "What has happened to her? How she is singing today!" And suddenly the whole world centered for him on anticipation of the next note, the next phrase, and everything in the world was divided into three beats: "Oh mio crudele affetto."... One, two, three... one, two, three... One... "Oh mio crudele affetto."... One, two, three... One. "Oh, this senseless life of ours!" thought Nicholas. "All this misery, and money, and Dolokhov, and anger, and honor--it's all nonsense...but this is real.... Now then, Natasha, now then, dearest! Now then, darling! How will she take that si? She's taken it! Thank God!" And without noticing that he was singing, to strengthen the si he sung a second, a third below the high note. "Ah, God! How fine! Did I really take it? How fortunate!" he thought.

Oh, how that chord vibrated, and how moved was something that was finest in Rostov's soul! And this something was apart from everything else in the world and above everything in the world. "What were losses, and Dolokhov, and words of honor?... All nonsense! One might kill and rob and yet be happy..."

This is what I feel when I hear you play, or sing. I am lifted above the barrenness, the ugliness, the stench, and the stupidity of the World, and I touch the Transcendent; the Eternal; the Beautiful; and the True. Like that moment, when, lying in the dust of Mordor, and realizing that there is no hope, even if they do fulfill their quest, that they will survive it, Sam sees the star in the heavens:

There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach. His song in the Tower had been defiance rather than hope; for then he was thinking of himself. Now, for a moment, his own fate, and even his master's, ceased to trouble him. He crawled back into the brambles and laid himself by Frodo's side, and putting away all fear he cast himself into a deep untroubled sleep.

And really, this is what you mean to me in a larger sense, even beyond your beautiful music. You are hope to me, and beauty beyond the reach of the evil and banality of the time in which we live. Beauty not only of body, but of soul; and most importantly, beauty of spirit. You may, in your modesty, question that this is so, but my eyes are long accustomed to finding beauty hidden amongst the ugliness, and my mind to discerning truth amongst the lies, and you know the truth of this. And I see your beauty and your truth, though you may not. You may then say, that there is that in you which I do not see yet, and do not know, and that I am giving you a place in my estimation which you cannot, in reality, match. But I answer that it is no goddess or angel that I see, but a human woman, with all her frailties and imperfections, and it is exactly that which makes me love you so. It takes no courage, strength, or virtue to be flawless when one has no challenges; admiration is due to the one who has all the weaknesses and struggles common to mankind, and yet is as good and lovely as you are. And, no, I am not giving you more credit than you deserve, or putting you in a place higher than I should; for I know full well that the light which I love in you is not your own, but the True Light, and that you are a vessel through which it shines. But what a beautiful vessel! It is this, though, that makes me love you most of all: that the light which is in me is the same as the light which is in you, and recognizes itself in another--and recognizes, too, as a unique expression of that light, its perfect counterpoint.

I saw these today and wished that I could buy them for you. I don't even know what they are; I just thought they were pretty and they made me think of you; I thought you'd like the colors.

I was just thinking what an interesting coincidence it is that you just "came of age" in the Shire and I just turned the age at which both Bilbo and Frodo set out on their adventures. I should like to have thrown you a coming of age party; sweet 33.

I've been keeping an eye out for Gandalf to come walking up my road, but no luck so far. It is just the start of Spring, though. Perhaps I should stock my larder for tea for thirteen dwarves and a wizard (though heaven knows where I'd put them; I don't even have a drawing-room), and be sure to keep an extra pocket handkerchief or two on hand. Just in case.

I love your music. When I listen to you, I am transported to another time and place; a better time and place; a place where there is joy in life, and all is right with the world. Perhaps one that has never really existed in this world, but is a sort of higher ideal. The way that certain periods of the past seem to us to have been utopian through the lenses of nostalgia and "the inconsolable longing," as the Inklings called it. When I'm listening to you, and you're playing secular music, I close my eyes and I feel like I'm in a place that exists somewhere between the past, the imagination, and the home that I've always longed for but never found. But when you're playing sacred music, I know that you are offering it in worship to the One, and toward the time and place, to which those longings truly point. And then, I close my eyes and join you in worship, and I am lifted up into the realms of divine light and inexpressible beauty; into the Heavens where the Eldili move, where Beatrice led Dante up toward the Penultimate.

I love the devotion, discipline, focus, and diligence that it took for you to achieve what you have. I love that you hold yourself to such a high standard, and how much it bothers you when you fall short of it by the tiniest bit. I don't love the displeasure or embarrassment you feel at those times, I just find your perfectionism adorable, and I want to wrap my arms around you, give you a kiss on the head, and tell you how phenomenal you are at what you do.