The Covenant of Love – A Letter by Nick Cave…
4th December 2024
I opened a different browser last night, and Nick Cave’s incredibly moving and powerful letter was waiting for me in my tab. I completely forgot it was there.
I remember sending it to you as soon as I first read it. I completely resonated with Nick’s words of wisdom. Every single word is true, and written so beautifully and passionately. How can words expressing the importance of loving fully with all our hearts, and the consequences of it, possibly be written in any other way?
I also remember telling you how beautiful Nick’s soul is. You thought he was brilliant as well, and you loved his letter as much as I did.
Reading Nick’s letter again, I’ve realised why I felt so alive with you. I first felt it when we hugged and said goodbye for the second time at the train station, when we met for Christmas. I thought I saw it reflected.
I’ve felt alive with you consistently over the last five years now. You’ve also been helping to keep me alive since I became extremely ill. There’s a part of me that has now died. My sparkle has gone. You’ve gone. There’s a big hole in my heart, and it breaks even further knowing I’ll never be able to speak with you or see you again.
I now realise the grief I’m feeling shows that I have loved you with all my heart, soul and being. I couldn’t fully understand why I felt such an overwhelming feeling of love when we hugged. I now know without a shadow of a doubt, that my love for you was whole, pure and unconditional. It still is.
Despite feeling completely devastated by your loss, I would love you just the same all over again. In fact even more so, knowing what I now know. My love for you will always reside in my heart, along with you. I hope you’ll be able to carry my love in your precious heart.
I hope my letter reached you safely. I really do hope it gave you some comfort and reassurance my lovely. I understand, and I am feeling your pain as well as mine.
I’m incredibly lucky, thankful and grateful to have found you my most beautiful and precious starshine. I’m just completely devastated to have lost you. I’m now experiencing, as Nick says, “the covenant of love”.
Nick wrote this letter in response to two questions:
Mauro Leuven, in Belgium, “I’m 17 years old, what can you tell me about love?”
Jenny, in Paris, “How do I not have my heart broken?”
Dear Mauro and Jenny,
The surest way to avoid a broken heart is to love nothing and no-one not your partner, your child, your mother or father, your brothers or sisters; not your friends; not your neighbour; not your dog or your cat; not your football team, your garden, your granny or your job. In short, love not the world and love nothing in it. Beware of the things that draw you to love music, art, literature, cinema, philosophy, nature and religion. Keep your heart narrow, hard, cynical, invulnerable, impenetrable, and shun small acts of kindness; be not merciful, forgiving, generous or charitable these acts expand the heart and make you susceptible to love because as Neil Young so plainly and painfully sings, ‘Only love can break your heart’. In short, resist love, because real love, big love, true love, fierce love, is a perilous thing, and travels surely towards its devastation. A broken heart – that grief of love – is always love’s true destination. This is the covenant of love.
However, Mauro, to resist love and inoculate yourself against heartbreak is to reject life itself, for to love is your primary human function. It is your duty to love in whatever way you can, and to move boldly into that love deeply, dangerously and recklessly and restore the world with your awe and wonder. This world is in urgent need desperate, crucial need and is crying out for love, your love. It cannot survive without it.
To love the world is a participatory and reciprocal action for what you give to the world, the world returns to you, many fold, and you will live days of love that will make your head spin, that you will treasure for all time. You will discover that love, radical love, is a kind of supercharged aliveness, and all that is of true value in the world is animated by it. And, yes, heartache awaits love’s end, but you find in time that this too is a gift – this little death from which you are reborn, time and again. I have only one piece of advice for you both, and it is the very best that I can give. Love. The world is waiting.
Love, Nick
Copyright: Nick Cave and The Red Hand Files