I've been reading Richard Feynman's letters to his first wife, Arline. Here is a fine man. I have always admired his contributions to physics, to the teaching of physics, and to general coolness and with-it-ology. Now I find out what he was to the love of his life—would that I'd read this book years ago.

His wife is dying the whole time, from before they get married. She has TB but he's not fazed. He knows what she is to him and he does not apparently hesitate in marrying her. There is an articulate letter to his parents warding off their disuasions and explaining his reasons—essentially, just love.

I am perplexed how a relationship could be so apparently functional & happy, with Arline lying inert in the Sanatorium while he works long hours in Los Alamos. But there is a clue in the saddest letter: "I want to have problems to discuss with you—I want to do little projects with you. . . . We started to learn to make clothes together—or learn Chinese—or getting a movie projector."

The letters are so immediate to me, so eminently understandable in a way that so much writing from bygone days leaves me puzzled. Much like W. N. P. Barbellion's blog journal, I can't believe life was so real, so rich, so natural, in a time before color photography. I expect everyone to talk like a Humphrey Bogart film, or write in some stately prose out of the US Constitution, say. But they, the people of the 1910s or the '40s, have ordinary, understandable thoughts to say to each other. And the problems are like ours! "Dear Mom," says Feynman, "Don't feel so bad about your typing. It is OK and getting better all the time." Another time: "The town council elections are coming up soon again. I hope I will avoid—and will try to avoid—being reelected." In 1945: "I think I've been working a little too hard again this week. I got enough sleep usually but I went to bed at 3 and got up at 11 most of the time."

In other past-blasting news: today a colleague of mine found, left on a shelf somewhere, an edition from '44 or so of a math book by J. E. Littlewood. For those not intimately acquainted with mathematical lore, Littlewood was a famous mathematician of the early part of the 20th century—one of the guys who showed up just as things were getting really good and knocked out loads of theorems before everybody started signing up for mathematician school. The book was full of those charming affectations they used to put even in serious math books, saying e.g. that this would be a clear and general treatment, that it would assume only the logical axioms, and that "every effort has been taken to avoid a philosophical speculation..."

Also: In the fantastic, splendid film Army of the Shadows, by Jean-Pierre Melville, the French Resistance is led by a fictional Luc Jardie, whose claim to fame is having written pretty mathematical monographs with titles like Transfinit et Continu.

Last and least, you will be wondering about the "Pastoral" in the title of this post. To that end, let me only remark that many days, such as today, when leaving the building where I "work," I see one to seventeen bunnies hopping around on the grassy spots. I thought you would enjoy thinking of that.