Double-Distilled Melancholia

James Cousins may be a poet and playwright rather than a fiction writer, but he's a fantastic letter writer and letters are most certainly prose. Maybe we could do something with letter-writing as a genre? That might be a good way to include cool manuscript material and show what terrible penmanship most of these crazy people had. I'm sure we have other letters like this one that uses such vivid and fantastic imagery to describe the process of inspiration and creation.

Letter from James Henry Cousins to ? 4.27.1899:

• “Did not I tell you I’d go raving mad after the (2) ecstasy of that ramble. I promptly developed a fit of thoroughbred double-distilled melancholia! This is dear mother nature’s usual plan of making me pay up for excess of enjoyment; but, like laughing, it’s nothing when one’s accustomed to it. And it is usually in such periods of gloom that some idea gets into my cranium, like the pain of sand in the oyster, around which the succulent bivalve casts a garb of pulp that only becomes a pearl to shine on my lady’s brow." (1-2)

• "Ah! how happy this poor old world would be if only people followed a star; a real, substantial, honest star, instead of the wills-o’-the-wisp that are so plentiful! That star has got into my imagination: I am still following it: I hope I (and the person who glorified its shining by (4) an apt thought) may find like the shepherd’s of old, if not the young child, at least the spirit of purity, truth, and wisdom which he came to show forth." (3-4)

• "I want to scale Killiney on Saturday, if weather permits. You know the way: will you act as my 'guide, philosopher, and friend'—chum, purely platinum!" (4)