My dear friends
I was writing a much longer letter, but it’s the end of the year and we’re all tired and in desperate need of doing things that don’t involve screens, so instead I am writing now just to wish you the best of the rest of the year, the joy of your friends and even of your family, the ease of the warm air and of whatever time and quiet you manage to gather up for yourself.
But let me beg just enough time and indulgence to say: there is much in 2023 for which I am grateful, but for none of it quite so fiercely as I am to you for embracing a book that I wasn’t necessarily expecting to find a home outside my heart. Finding Endurance has sold out its print runs three times in South Africa so far, and the same number again internationally, and I am astonished by that, but it doesn’t matter a fraction as much as the messages and mails I’ve received from you about it. The book meant a lot to me, and there is an invisible something in it, a silence between the words, for which I don’t feel responsible, containing something I can’t quite explain, and I never for a moment expected anyone else to feel it too. Life is lonely and connection flickers at best, a candle in the draught that comes in between the cracks, but I have never felt quite so un-lonely as I did when reading your messages.
In Georgia earlier this year I met a good Russian man who asked me, with a very Russian intensity, “What do you most hope for your book?” I thought about it seriously and replied, “A very small miracle.” Thank you for that miracle.
I will write again more fully in the new year – for now, I wish you a Happy Hannukah, a merry Christmas, a new year of delight. I wish you a multiplicity of very small miracles, and I send my love to all of you.
Darrel
