Loved By Another Prologue

I wonder what have taught my daughter as she grew, had I been allowed her privilege. I guess I would have taught her to seek beauty, that there is so higher order, that beauty comes in many manifestations. War, through seeming to be beautiful and enticing is an illusion, a hate hidden by beauty by way of curiosity. I would have taught her that actual beauty is so present, swelling from all of us and from the naturalness in all we do.

I have managed to live through a civil war in a country not my own and a world war in a place I no longer belonged. I settled to live in NYC because here beauty, an obsession that I have been seeking all my life, manifests to include every aspect of life. The streets are filled with many people, many languages, many cultures and nature makes her appearance all over the place to remind us that although we live more among each other that with her, she will consume us all. Everybody is at lest represented in this city, a city of outcasts who can only belong here because there is no other place to go. This city is an anomaly made entirely of other anomalies, which is why I stay.

I am often lead to wondering if my daughter is anywhere here, but I cannot dwell on the past, on this, as I am too old to dwell on a life such as mine. This diary I am leaving to the Washington historical society. I have never kept one outside of 1857-1865. I did try, during the years in which I returned to England an d Europe, but I could not maintain the meaningless of my life after the loss my daughter and the blooded devastation after the war.

At the beginning of the Great War, in 1917, I was already an old woman and was traversing Africa at the time. I have never married, or had any children, and this being my most valuable memory, my most valuable possession, this diary of 1857, began when I was 18, left when I was too devastated to write anymore in 1865, at 26, is left in he possession of strangers.