Frida Kahlo : First Love : MARIA POPOVA | The Marginalian

The Courage of Vulnerability: Teenage Frida Kahlo’s Moving Letters to Her First Love

and again I don't know why I don't post more links to The Marginalian as I read it so frequently and am always by turn intrigued, fascinated, filled with awe at Maria’s breadth of research and taste . . .we so often cross paths . . . . . 

From the outset, her letters command and caress at the same time. “Write to me often and long, the longer the better,” she urges him in one. “On Saturday I’ll bring your sweater, your books and a lot of violets,” she tells him in another. She takes love as seriously as it ought to be taken but also knows it dies without play: “Sorry about constantly repeating the word ‘love’ five times in a row, but it’s just that I’m very silly.” She signs herself “your pretty girl (monkey face),” “your girl, buddy, woman or whatever you like,” “your sister (girlfriend, buddy, wife).” (It starts so early, that trembling gamble of the heart by which a person tries to discern what they mean to another.) Over and over, she offers glimpses into her uncommon inner world. In a letter penned the summer she turned seventeen, after some arrangements for how they can see each other — Frida’s parents disapproved of the relationship — she writes:

Now I’m going to read Salambo until half past 10, it’s 8 o’clock now, and then the Bible in three volumes and, finally, think for a while about huge scientific problems and then go to bed, and sleep until half past 7 in the morning, eh? Until tomorrow, may we have a good night and may we both think that great friends must love each other very, very much, much, much, much, much, mucho . . . with “m” for music or for “mundo.”

A month later, she offers that lovely unasked assurance that makes a fragile young love feel safe and solid:

My Alex, since I won’t see you for two days and I miss you so much, I’m writing you this so that you will start to believe something that you don’t believe, but which is very true.

And then, beneath a drawing, she adds:

Please forgive me for not writing any more but I started to draw the doll at 9 and it took me an astronomical three quarters of an hour to draw and another half hour to write, so it’s about 10 now and you know that makes me sleepy like the hens, but I’ll keep writing this letter in my dreams and you know that I would write enough to fill at least a thousand pages.

I love you very much.

Your pretty girl (monkey face)

MARIA POPOVA

Read on here: 

https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/04/01/frida-kahlo-alejandro-gomez-arias-love-letters/?mc_cid=c2f71f9686&mc_eid=fd335459cc

FORGIVENESS - Maria Popova (read by NICK CAVE)

 Wot? We can have poetry . . .it’s a SUNDAY! It’s NICK CAVE! reading Maria Popova

on FORGIVENESS

FORGIVENESS

by Maria Popova

May the tide
never tire of its tender toil
how over and over
it forgives the Moon
the daily exile
and returns to turn
mountains into sand
         as if to say,
you too can have
this homecoming
you too possess
this elemental power
of turning
the stone in the heart
into golden dust.

Writer of the Day | URSULA K. LE GUIN on again and beauty + Maria Popova ‘The Marginalian'

I forget how beautiful she was as a younger woman.

Ursula K. Le Guin:

 If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself—as men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation—you may hate it, or deify it, but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality, and its human reality. You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality.

"American SF and The Other" in Science-Fiction Studies 7, 1975.

There were some interviews on Radio 4 ‘Women’s Hour’ this morning by women Sci Fi writers and all mentioned Le Guin who I greatly admire alongside many others

By sheer coincidence the newsletter this morning from the wonderful Maria Popova, her Marginalian, feature’s Le Guin on the transience of beauty

Beauty always has rules. It’s a game. I resent the beauty game when I see it controlled by people who grab fortunes from it and don’t care who they hurt. I hate it when I see it making people so self-dissatisfied that they starve and deform and poison themselves. Most of the time I just play the game myself in a very small way, buying a new lipstick, feeling happy about a pretty new silk shirt.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Le Guin, who writes about aging with more grace, humor, and dignity than any other writer I’ve read, turns to the particularly stifling ideal of eternal youth:

One rule of the game, in most times and places, is that it’s the young who are beautiful. The beauty ideal is always a youthful one. This is partly simple realism. The young are beautiful. The whole lot of ’em. The older I get, the more clearly I see that and enjoy it.

M. Popova

The Marginalian