Woodrow Wilson to Mary Allen Hulbert Peck

I have not the least idea where you are, and do not know why, in the midst of studying pardon cases and documents of every other sort, which I have a chance to examine only on Sundays, I should be stopping to write a letter which I cannot launch into space but must keep until I know your address. I suppose it is from force of habit; and that I do now know how to get comfortably through a Sunday without a chat with you. I will at least begin the little epistle, and can finish it when I learn where you are. And how devoutly I hope that that will be soon! It is uncomfortable to have lost a friend of whom I think so often, and would like to imagine as somewhere in particular. My thoughts are hardly interchangeable as between Trenton, New York, Nantucket, and Boston! Will you not, please, when you get, or are about to get, a definite habitat, let some dear friends of yours know as promptly as possible? ’’’’’’’ You see it's this way: We live distracting days. You are witness of that. We are at the becjk and call of others (how many, many others!) and almost never have had a chance to order our days as we wish to order them, or to follow our own thoughts and devices. The life we lead is one of infinite distraction, confusion, —fragmentary, broken in upon and athwart in every conceivable way; and I, for one, need fixed points upon which to base my thought at least, if I can have none on which to base my actions from hour to hour. My friends are those fixed points. My intercourse with them helps me restore my identity from time to time, to get the confusion out of my nervous system and feel like the real Woodrow Wilson, a fellow of fixed connections, loyal to long established, deep–rooted friendships and associations, living through his heart and his affections, his tastes and all that runs in him independent of circumstance and occupation and momentary tasks. You may judge my uneasiness, therefore, and how my daily confusions are worse confounded if my best friends are themselves eluding my imagination for days together and preventing me from following them; playing hide and seek with my mind; avoiding my company! I'll have none of it, madam! Here I sit to–night feeling very much as if I were writing to an immaterial person, with no particular location in space; and you cannot imagine what an uncomfortable feeling it gives me. You have an unfair advantage, too. You know where I am not only but, if you believe what you read in the newspapers, you seem to know every movement of my busy week. Knowinhg me as you do, and the main things moving about me, you can easily imagine what I am thinking and what comments I am provoked to make, to those to whom I can speak without fear of being overheard or quoted, As I would speak to you; whereas I! My mind will not move in vacuo! I could imagine what you were doing if I could know where you are. I could even guess what you were thinking and saying. Please be kind and let me be at ease again in doing what I most love to do, live in thought with the friends I love, the friends who are mine whether I am in office or out, in Washington or at some unknown end of the earth. This round I live here will be all but intolerable otherwise. Where are you? What are you doing? What are you intending? Mary Hulbert in Trenton, in New York, or in Nantucket I know; but Mary Hulbert somewhere in space, — goodness knows where! how am I to know? ”””””””””””””””””” At last the embargo is broken (this fourth day of June in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and thirteen) and this letter can go to Mary Hulbert in Nantucket. Your little note to Helen has come and you are once more on the map! Hurrah for that! It gives me an entirely different feeling. But this is Wednesday, the rush of the week is upon me, and I can only in desperate haste grind off this additional line or two. I am glad you are in Nantucket. I feel as if the peace of the place, and its charm, were sure to get hold of you and act on your thoughts and on your spirits; and that makes me deelpy content. I am glad that you liked the little volumes. They are bully companions. I know them of old. We are all well, and all join in most affectionate messages.