Brief aan Anna Dorothea Dirks Possibly 1926

This is Johan Huizinga’s letter to Anna Dorothea Dirks, penned sometime in the first half of the twentieth century. Look at that looping script – it’s like a dance across the page. You can almost feel the scratch of the nib as it rushes to keep up with his thoughts, then pauses, hovering between one word and the next. I wonder, did he labor over each sentence, or did the words flow easily? I know that feeling of wanting to get it just right, to capture the essence of what you're trying to say, but sometimes the more you try, the more elusive it becomes! Think about the physical act of writing, the pressure of the hand, the way the ink bleeds into the paper, leaving its mark. It’s all there in the texture of the letter, an echo of the artist's presence, and a connection to the intimacy of the moment. It’s amazing to think about how one person’s thoughts, expressed in ink, can leap across time and space to touch another.