is the subtitle of a website I’ve recently discovered, called Letters of Note and which publishes just what it says. letters and notes. from all sorts of people, ranging from Mark Twain to David Bowie, or the likes of Queen Victoria and Mohandas Gandhi.
one of the most impressive examples of correspondence must be Kurt Vonnegut‘s letter to his family, written shortly after he survived work camp as a prisoner of war and the bombing of Dresden:
On about February 14th the Americans came over, followed by the R.A.F. their combined labors killed 250,000 people in twenty-four hours and destroyed all of Dresden — possibly the world’s most beautiful city. But not me.
After that we were put to work carrying corpses from Air-Raid shelters; women, children, old men; dead from concussion, fire or suffocation. Civilians cursed us and threw rocks as we carried bodies to huge funeral pyres in the city.
When General Patton took Leipzig we were evacuated on foot to (‘the Saxony-Czechoslovakian border’?). There we remained until the war ended. Our guards deserted us. On that happy day the Russians were intent on mopping up isolated outlaw resistance in our sector. Their planes (P-39′s) strafed and bombed us, killing fourteen, but not me.
so it goes.
