... The literary gift in which Julia Dimashqiyah most excelled was the art of letter-writing; among the treasured possessions of every friend, woman or man, of those who loved and admired her, there is a letter, or letters, wrapped in silk... and steeped in perfume...

What a long, tender breath was hers, and how she addressed the depths of the heart with such sincerity and devotion!..

Here are some samples of her letters... The first is an excerpt from a letter to her old friend, the mother of Farid Zayn al-Din.

And here is another morning that I greet after a long night spent, like hundreds of its kind, without ever tasting sleep.

Yet this night, for all the anxiety that beset me, was for me like a stroll in a garden of paradise compared with the desolation, the pain, and the despair I used to suffer in the sleepless nights gone by; for from the moment I sensed the first signs of insomnia threatening me, I stubbornly resolved not to allow my other half — that is, my body — to come between my soul and you, whatever it might cost me. And indeed, I left this body to its own devices, to wrestle with pain alone and to bear the consequences of that mighty resistance it puts up in order to win more life for itself alone, while I clung close to you until the break of dawn...

How strange a thing this body is, my friend! — this frame that belongs to me; for despite its small account, and the triviality of the wares that fit it for life — bone, flesh, and blood, the stuff of its existence — it will go on driving me to seek more of life, toward ambition! toward hope!! And what hope, I wonder!! — when it possesses no equipment to tempt it, and to tempt me, to remain in this clamorous world except this threadbare cage, its limbs and ribs tottering, battered by pain and deprivation on every side. And it seems to me it will carry on in this same mighty onrush, this open defiance of medicine and doctors and all the laws of nature, until the day comes when it does battle with the hydrogen bomb in the arena of death and annihilation!!

And now, what have I to do with this body? Let me leave it to itself and return to you with what I have drawn from you, with what appeared to me during

my nightly solitude before it escapes me and I can no longer remember any of it: for this is what used to happen to me whenever I resolved to set down the thoughts that came to me at night, believing that some of them were beautiful and precious and worth recording; but no sooner would dawn break and my reaching for the pen draw near than they would vanish from my memory, as though they had never been.

How I wished my night would last longer — this night in which I practiced in earnest, with certainty, and with success, breaking free of my body and its pains — breaking free of all these fetters, and of the thoughts that so often troubled the serenity of the intervals when I was free of pain; chief among them this conscience that clings to me as flesh clings to bone, and that lies ever in wait for me — especially at night — to remind me of every error, every shortcoming, every slip of the tongue that escaped me the day before.

Was it not you who opened before me the paths of this spiritual excursion, so that I saw with my soul what no human being can see with the naked eye in the light of day of the fine details of the inner life, while he is shackled by every kind of material and social fetter and consideration?..

And what a wonderful excursion it was! And how happy I was! — moving, in the solitude of night, among memories of the friendship and comradeship that united our inclinations and our aims! I traversed all those stages we had covered together, step by step, with great caution and deliberation, lest my foot should slip, as sometimes happened to me when I went about in the world of waking and activity.

My darling, you must scorn those childish attachments that young men and men form with women and girls to no purpose or profit, which serve only to debase