Read Virginia Woolf’s last letter to her husband before she loaded her coat up with stones and drowned herself in a river.
Mike Tyson, The Wall Street Journal
Dearest,
I feel certain that I am going mad again. I have this incredible urge to bite somebody’s ear off. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time, not the way I did after Lady Ottoline Morrell decked me with a right hook in Tokyo.
I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what they’re telling me to do—get a Maori face tattoo. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer–not since I fired Bill Cayton and got in bed with Don King.
I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. Maybe three rounds of shadowboxing, three rounds on the light bag, three on the heavy bag–then maybe ten minutes of jumping rope to cool down.
You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you—well, you and my pigeons. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that — everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Either you or Cus D’Amato.
Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer. I’m going to load my pockets up with stones, right after I make weight for the Mitch Green fight.
I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been. But that’s what they said about Mike Tyson and Robin Givens before that awful interview on Barbara Walters.
V.
Is this what you would call a literary mash-up? Or is it more like a literary knockout? 😀