If you have been thinking of Troy, I have been thinking of Aulis. And Moriyyah. And Shelley's Ozymandias -- the hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed -- and T. S. Eliot, with whom I have been wrestling for longer than you have been alive, and whom I had always intended to lend you, one month when we had nothing more pressing with which to occupy ourselves, for the joy of watching you wrestle with him, too.

Read the Four Quartets, if you have been thinking about the shadows of a great war. You will find East Coker speaks to you most plainly (home is where one starts from; as we grow older, the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated, of dead and living), but as should surprise you not in the least, Little Gidding is the one that speaks to me most clearly, and always has:

And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

Yes, I will be giving you books until my end.

I will not defend Barty to you -- may his memory be eternal, ныне и присно и во веки веков -- and I would not expect you to listen if I tried, because as near as I can tell he was mad with grief and guilt and pain, and for all that I understand that grief and guilt and pain (O gods do I understand that grief and guilt and pain), madness must be stopped. I comfort myself by thinking even he must have known that, at the end. (There are so many things that must be stopped, and I was the one who set too fucking many of them into motion in the first place, and I suppose now the price I must pay for having done so is to be the one who decides where to begin looking for the end. Which is my beginning.) But I loved him, and I will not stop loving him, and it is good to know that someone wrote the prayers for him immediately, that he was not left entirely to

no, I shall leave it there, I think. Safer. You can comfort yourself, at least, that whatever I do next, it won't be out of madness. Or maybe you won't find that a comfort at all.

If we are to add up the measure of my balance, I am well aware of which direction that balance falls, and I will answer for that when I must. Do not apologise to me for not having been able to convince the company you keep that I am anything other than the monster they name me. You are perhaps the only person left upon these shores who can see at least some measure of what went into my making, and I will not expect you to champion me further. I had not expected you to champion me at all.

I have not ever doubted your love for me, little star, as I hope you have not doubted mine for you. For all that we may be the only people who can recognise it as such, from time to time.