Super-Infinite by Katherine Rundell

Author:Katherine Rundell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

THE SUICIDAL MAN

I begin to be past hope of dying … Death came so fast towards me that the over-joy of that recovered me.

Letter to Robert Ker

The years between 1607 and 1610 are biographically murky. The letters are hard to date and hard to decipher, and the best historical records we have are of jobs that didn’t happen. He failed to get a position in the Queen’s household in 1607, and there are references in the letters to his application to jobs in Ireland or, even more remotely, Virginia, but neither came to anything, if they were ever serious prospects to begin with. It’s equally likely that they were an attempt on his part to look industrious, both to his friends and to himself; neither Ireland nor Virginia were at all desirable places at the time.

We do have, though, some of his weekly letters to Henry Goodere, letters filled with attempts at counsel and spiritual comfort, ironical gripings at Donne’s own days, money worries, and a great deal of letter-writing about letter-writing: frequent apologies for the scrappiness of the letter itself and of the exigencies of the carrier. This was before Charles I’s 1635 postal reforms, so his letters crossed the city and country, haphazard and often lost, in hands of merchants, personal servants, friends, and messenger boys who seemed always to be hovering at Donne’s shoulder, ready to snatch the paper away. As the years went on, more and more letters carried accounts of sickness and pain – he grew ill, and each illness refused to fade entirely. One spring, he wrote, bluntly, ‘The pleasantness of the season displeases me. Everything refreshes, and I wither, and I grow older and not better.’

As his pain grew, so too did his dream of being dead and rid of it all. In one particular undated letter, the pain was greater than normal:

I have contracted a sickness which I cannot name nor describe. For it hath so much of a continual cramp, that it wrests the sinews … but it will not kill me yet; I shall be in this world, like a porter in a great house, ever nearest the door, but seldomest abroad: I shall have many things to make me weary, and yet not get leave to be gone.

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