In Love with Life

Peter Tchaikovsky never met his patron Nadezhda von Meck, but in the summer of 1880 he stayed at her estate in Ukraine, and he wrote her a letter expressing his pleasure at two aspects of life there:

At sunset I had tea and then wandered alone by the steep bank of the stream behind the deer park, and drank in all the deep delight of the forest at sundown and freshness of the evening air. Such moments, though, helped us to bear with patience the many minor grievances of existence. They make us in love with life. We are promised eternal happiness, immortal existence, but we do not realize it, nor shall we perhaps attain it. But if we are worthy of it, and if it is really eternal, we shall soon learn to enjoy it. Meanwhile, one wishes to live, in order to experience again such moments….

Today I intended to leave for Simaki, but as I write to you a terrific storm is raging, and it is evidently going to be a wet day, so perhaps I shall remain here….

Dear friend, today I have committed a kind of burglary in your house, and I will confess my crime. There was no key to the bookcase in the drawing room next to your bedroom, but I saw that it contained some new books which interested me greatly. Even Marcel could not find the key, so it occurred to me to try the one belonging to the cupboard near my room, and it opened the bookcase at once. I took out Byron, and Martinov’s Moscow. Don’t worry, all of your books and music remain untouched. To quiet Marcel’s conscience…I gave him a memorandum of what I have taken, and before I leave I will return to him the books and music to put back in their proper order.