This man could read the installation instructions for a ceiling fan and I would still give him my complete and pure attention because it would be beautiful.
Gerald Durrell wrote the funniest book I’ve ever read “My Family and Other Animals”. Simply can’t read it without weeping with laughter. Now it turns out he wrote the funniest, expressive and most beautiful love letter. Such a letter! Oh to be the recipient of such a wonderful, descriptive, human and honest declaration. Tom Hiddleston reads this wonderfully and brings every breath of love and nuance to life.
There was a quotation from "My Family ..." as a Comprehension question in one of my English exams, as a child. It was the passage about "the courtship dances of the scorpions", and it impressed me so much that I wrote title and author on my hand and, straight after school, rushed off to get it out of the library.
Obviously I like Tom Hiddleston as much as the next person, but what's truly terrifying about this is knowing that this is a real letter. It is so easy to dismiss romance from film and literature because they are works of fiction... but this is real! How do you move on with life knowing that such great love does exist in the real world? I am incredibly jealous of Gerald Durrell and Lee McGeorge to have loved and been loved like this at least at one point of their lives. I'm left feeling sad and utterly helpless...
11:03 " . . . and seen a thousand wonderful things. "All this, I did without you. This was my loss. "All this, I want to do with you. This will be my gain. "All this, I would gladly have forgone for the sake of one minute of your company."
Hiddleston is my favourite in all these letter readings so far. His pace and tone are smooth, his voice is clear, not rushed. He becomes the letter writer.
My parents used to read out loud to us on vacations. The Wind in the Willows, The Chronicles of Narnia, and we acted out A Midsummers Night Dream. I happened to read to my father The Piper at the Gates of Dawn from the Wind and the Willows the night before he passed. Please read out loud more!
I always come back here when i find no hope for love anymore. To remind myself that this kind of love does existㅡ not in literary fiction but in real life! To experience such thing even for one lifetime would be considered such a great gift one can possess. I truly hope that the love we yearns for finds us in time that we are still able to explore one another. Love in the right time ❤ 11:03 ♡♡♡
I m not sure about how many times I m gonna listen to this even not sure to which I m more addicted either Tom Hiddleston's voice or Gerald Durrell's words 💖💖💖💖💖
Even if this was the most beautiful love letter ever written, and it was read to me with Tom' Hiddleston's irresistible voice, at the mention of serious jealousy my only thought was: RUN!
It's interesting. He doesn't ever describe acting upon it. Just that it devours him. That is what jealousy does - destroy happiness like a worm - invisible but inexorable.
A truly beautiful letter from a truly talented writer. Many would take the jealousy thing as BIG RED FLAG these days. But they lived and loved happily for many many years. Love conquers all. Tom Hiddleston really did this letter justice in his reading of it.
Hiddleston is one of my favorite actors. This reading, his tone and depth of feeling, is the most fervent expression of love I have ever heard from someone, other than the man I loved for over 30 years. I wanted to see everything, hear everything and experience every thing with him. How fortunate that I was able to do so for so long! I really enjoyed the other comments. I, too, would happily listen to Tom Hiddleston read an instruction manual!
Gerald Durrell has written many non-fiction books about his crazy life as a wildlife conservationist (that I highly recommend), and this lovely letter is very reminiscent of the weaving of beautiful imagery in those. As a kid, Durrell brought me so close to those far away places I could almost _smell_ them. A fantastic read by Tom, I was just as transported by his voice! Durrell's wife Lee is in many of the later books, if anyone is curious about seeing her interact and speak through Gerry's view of her (and deal with all their many, many animals lol).
Simply brilliant. It is very sad that there is a dearth of men acknowledging they have experienced this beautiful piece of writing. It's as if to express love and to comprehend its beauty makes men weak. It is sad that such a terrible affliction burdens my sex.
The second most beautiful love letter ever written! How can I not envy two people gifted with such a love? I have never known the experience, but can only hope to call it mine some day. Beautifully read by Tom ensures an even greater degree of awe.
@@pamelasarkar9763 Not the other user but to me, Sullivan Ballou's letter to his wife is devastatingly beautiful. It may not be as vividly poetic but there's something incredibly powerful to the earnestness of this person writing what might be the last words to the love of his life. th-cam.com/video/78SOjurJkHk/w-d-xo.html
After listening to such an amazing delivery of such a work of art from Tom, I can’t help but feel envious of their love. But it is not envy nor jealousy which prevails in ones mind after. It is love. The love that the author of the letter has for the recipient. It is radiating from the letter some of it becoming embedded in our hearts and making us ever so wanting to experience it in the magnitude in which he is.
That made me blush, that made me smile, that made me roll my eyes, that made me tear up, that made me stop breathing. I actually have to recover from that letter (and from his reading of it 🔥).
Mr. Hiddleston reads with such a passionate & personal investment in his desire to communicate effectively the lovely words and experiences possible in this sacred, mysterious, wondrous and frightening world. The letter and the love are wonderful, but somehow even more so is the present-day actor. I want this gallant, erudite prince among men to be immortal. On this day, we are living thru a climate crisis, a global pandemic with herd immunity years into the future; a new great depression; hungry children; wars; a refugee disaster which will only worsen; a dissolute, dangerous and ignoble American administration and now, social and racial unrest for the murders of too many people of color by the police. So I turn away presently from the many wondrous books, gardens, animals and family to this reading-for relief, for the remembrance of joy this gentleman imparts.
#Beautiful, awsome voice...... July 31st, 1978 My darling McGeorge, You said that things seemed clearer when they were written down. Well, herewith is a very boring letter in which I will try and put everything down so that you may read and re-read it in horror at your folly in getting involved with me. Deep breath. To begin with, I love you with a depth and passion that I have felt for no one else in this life and if it astonishes you it astonishes me as well. Not - I hasten to say - because you are not worth loving. Far from it. It’s just that, first of all, I swore I would not get involved with another woman. Secondly, I have never had such a feeling before and it is almost frightening. Thirdly, I would never have thought it possible that another human being could occupy my waking (and sleeping) thoughts to the exclusion of almost everything else. Fourthly, I never thought that - even if one was in love - one could get so completely besotted with another person so that a minute away from them felt like a thousand years. Fifthly, I never hoped, aspired, dreamed that one could find everything one wanted in a person. I was not such an idiot as to believe this was possible. Yet, in you, I have found everything I want: you are beautiful, gay, giving, gentle, idiotically and deliciously feminine, sexy, wonderfully intelligent and wonderfully silly as well. I want nothing else in this life than to be with you, to listen and watch you - your beautiful voice, your beauty - to argue with you, to laugh with you, to show you things and share things with you, to explore your magnificent mind, to explore your wonderful body, to help you, protect you, serve you, and bash you on the head when I think you are wrong… not to put too fine a point on it I consider that I am the only man outside mythology to have found the crock of gold at the rainbow’s end. But - having said all that - let us consider things in detail. Don’t let this become public but… well, I have one or two faults. Minor ones, I hasten to say. For example, I am inclined to be overbearing. I do it for the best possible motives (all tyrants say that) but I do tend (without thinking) to tread people underfoot. You must tell me when I am doing it to you, my sweet, because it can be a very bad thing in a marriage. Right. Second blemish. This, actually, is not so much a blemish of character as a blemish of circumstance. Darling, I want you to be you in your own right, and I will do everything I can to help you in this. But you must take into consideration that I am also me in my own right and that I have a headstart on you… what I am trying to say is that you mustn’t feel offended if you are sometimes treated simply as my wife. (Always remember that what you lose on the swings, you gain on the roundabouts). But, I am an established creature in the world, and so - on occasions - you will have to live in my shadow. Nothing gives me less pleasure than this but it is a fact of life that has to be faced. Third (and very important and nasty) blemish: jealousy. I don’t think you know what jealousy is - thank God - in the real sense of the word. I know you have felt jealousy over Lincoln’s wife and child but this is what I call normal jealousy, and this - to my regret - is not what I’ve got. What I have got is a black monster that can pervert my good sense, my good humour and any goodness that I have in my make-up. It is really a Jekyll and Hyde situation… my Hyde is stronger than my good sense and defeats me, hard though I try. As I told you, I have always known that this lurks within me, but I could control it, and my monster slumbered and nothing happened to awake it. Then I met you… and I felt my monster stir and become half awake when you told me of Lincoln and others you have known and, with your letter, my monster came out of its lair - black, irrational, bigoted, stupid, evil, malevolent. You will never know how terribly corrosive jealousy is; it is a physical pain as though you had swallowed acid or red hot coals. It is the most terrible of feelings. But you can’t help it - at least I can’t. God knows I’ve tried. I don’t want any ex-boyfriends sitting in church when I marry you. On our wedding day, I want nothing but happiness, both for you and me, and I know I won’t be happy if there is a church full of your ex-conquests. When I marry you I will have no past, only a future: I don’t want to drag my past into our future and I don’t want you to do it, either. Remember, I am jealous of you because I love you. You are never jealous of something you don’t care about. OK, enough about jealousy. Now, let me tell you something… I have seen a thousand sunsets and sunrises; on land where it floods forests and mountains with honey-coloured light; at sea where it rises and sets like a blood orange in a multi-coloured nest of cloud, slipping in and out of the vast ocean. I have seen a thousand moons: harvest moons like gold coins, winter moons as white as ice chips, new moons like baby swans’ feathers. I have seen seas as smooth as if painted, coloured like shot silk or blue as a kingfisher or transparent as glass or black and crumpled with foam, moving ponderously and murderously. I have felt winds straight from the South Pole, bleak and wailing like a lost child; winds as tender and warm as a lover’s breath; winds that carried the astringent smell of salt and the death of seaweeds; winds that carried the moist rich smell of a forest floor - the smell of a million flowers. Fierce winds that churned and moved the sea like yeast, or winds that made the waters lap at the shore like a kitten. I have known silence: the cold, earthy silence at the bottom of a newly dug well; the implacable stony silence of a deep cave; the hot, drugged, midday silence when everything is hypnotized and stilled into silence by the eye of the sun; the silence when great music ends. I have heard summer cicadas cry so that the sound seems stitched into your bones. I have heard tree frogs in an orchestration as complicated as Bach singing in a forest lit by a million emerald fireflies. I have heard the Keas calling over grey glaciers that groaned to themselves like old people as they inched their way to the sea. I have heard the hoarse street vendor cries of the mating fur seals as they sang to their sleek golden wives, the crisp staccato admonishment of the rattlesnake, the cobweb squeak of the bat and the belling roar of the red deer knee-deep in purple heather. I have heard wolves baying at a winter’s moon, red howlers making the forest vibrate with their roaring cries. I have heard the squeak, purr, and grunt of a hundred multi-coloured reef fishes. I have seen hummingbirds flashing like opals round a tree of scarlet blooms, humming like a top. I have seen flying fish, skittering like quicksilver across the blue waves, drawing silver lines on the surface with their tails. I have seen spoonbills flying home to roost like a scarlet banner across the sky. I have seen whales, black as tar, cushioned on a cornflower blue sea, creating a Versailles of fountain with their breath. I have watched butterflies emerge and sit, trembling, while the sun irons their wings smooth. I have watched tigers, like flames, mating in the long grass. I have been dive-bombed by an angry raven, black and glossy as the Devil’s hoof. I have lain in water warm as milk, soft as silk, while around me played a host of dolphins. I have met a thousand animals and seen a thousand wonderful things… All this I did without you. This was my loss. All this I want to do with you. This will be my gain. All this I would gladly have forgone for the sake of one minute of your company, for your laugh, your voice, your eyes, hair, lips, body, and above all for your sweet, ever-surprising mind which is an enchanting quarry in which it is my privilege to delve. 13
Amazing letter. To think that this man Gerald Durrell was born in my hometown, a very small town in India. The words are so amazing, so beautiful, so touching. And Tom Hiddleston? What can one say about him that hasn’t already been said?
Certain people have the talent to capture imagination so richly in their expressions. This is one such letter. I literally, being a former literature student, rushed back to reading John Keats' love letter to Fanny Brawne after listening to this one. I think Letters Live can incorporate Keats' letters, maybe. It won't be a bad idea for sure.
How that man could write! Every bit as poetic as his brother Lawrence. Not sure if he would really have given up all the wonders he’d seen for this new young love but thank God he wrote it. And beautifully read of course!
how do these not have more views? this is amazing, historically, a time pre social media, and its the best actors today reading these letters. its also funny as hell.
There I was listening to a letter...and as the seconds went by I felt that time was standing still. All I could hear inside my soul was an hypnotic voice wonderfully reciting the most beautiful words of love I had ever heard..it left me thinking ..love does exist after all and it must be amazing!!!
Gaaaahhhhhh!!!!!!! The English language is a beautiful tool in the hands of a crafts person is it not? Whether it’s the writer of the prose or the speaker of the lines. This was utterly delicious to listen to. 🥰
Most of us will never have such worldly experience, nor describe it in such wonderful ways.. But to say "I love you" into other's eyes.. that is the great adventure.
Gerald Durrell! When I was 12 years old, my high school class was given 'The Bafut Beagles' to read as a set book for English Literature. I have been hooked ever since. My favorite book of his is 'The Stationary Ark' which sets out his views on conservation. Read it (if you can get hold of a copy). Then visit Jersey Zoo if you can.
He was twenty years older. Later wrote another letter or card, on a birthday, in his own words when she turned 'a half sixty' (30) and he was 'a half hundred' (50) years of age.
Beauty on beauty about beauty. Thanks - for the reading, for the posting. For Gerald Durrell. My God. Talk about any endangered species. But can an individual like this be properly described as a species? Yes, because there were also Shakespeare and Mozart and Leonard Cohen. Merci.
Writing great love letters is a dying art. Someone should post some drivel written in the language of texting ( if you can call it that ). Compared to this lovely letter that would be hysterical.
You said that things seemed clearer when they were written down. Well, herewith is a very boring letter in which I will try and put everything down so that you may read and re-read it in horror at your folly in getting involved with me. Deep breath. To begin with, I love you with a depth and passion that I have felt for no one else in this life and if it astonishes you it astonishes me as well. Not - I hasten to say - because you are not worth loving. Far from it. It’s just that, first of all, I swore I would not get involved with another woman. Secondly, I have never had such a feeling before and it is almost frightening. Thirdly, I would never have thought it possible that another human being could occupy my waking (and sleeping) thoughts to the exclusion of almost everything else. Fourthly, I never thought that - even if one was in love - one could get so completely besotted with another person so that a minute away from them felt like a thousand years. Fifthly, I never hoped, aspired, dreamed that one could find everything one wanted in a person. I was not such an idiot as to believe this was possible. Yet, in you, I have found everything I want: you are beautiful, gay, giving, gentle, idiotically and deliciously feminine, sexy, wonderfully intelligent and wonderfully silly as well. I want nothing else in this life than to be with you, to listen and watch you - your beautiful voice, your beauty - to argue with you, to laugh with you, to show you things and share things with you, to explore your magnificent mind, to explore your wonderful body, to help you, protect you, serve you, and bash you on the head when I think you are wrong… not to put too fine a point on it I consider that I am the only man outside mythology to have found the crock of gold at the rainbow’s end. But - having said all that - let us consider things in detail. Don’t let this become public but… well, I have one or two faults. Minor ones, I hasten to say. For example, I am inclined to be overbearing. I do it for the best possible motives (all tyrants say that) but I do tend (without thinking) to tread people underfoot. You must tell me when I am doing it to you, my sweet, because it can be a very bad thing in a marriage. Right. Second blemish. This, actually, is not so much a blemish of character as a blemish of circumstance. Darling, I want you to be you in your own right, and I will do everything I can to help you in this. But you must take into consideration that I am also me in my own right and that I have a headstart on you… what I am trying to say is that you mustn’t feel offended if you are sometimes treated simply as my wife. (Always remember that what you lose on the swings, you gain on the roundabouts). But, I am an established creature in the world, and so - on occasions - you will have to live in my shadow. Nothing gives me less pleasure than this but it is a fact of life that has to be faced. Third (and very important and nasty) blemish: jealousy. I don’t think you know what jealousy is - thank God - in the real sense of the word. I know you have felt jealousy over Lincoln’s wife and child but this is what I call normal jealousy, and this - to my regret - is not what I’ve got. What I have got is a black monster that can pervert my good sense, my good humour and any goodness that I have in my make-up. It is really a Jekyll and Hyde situation… my Hyde is stronger than my good sense and defeats me, hard though I try. As I told you, I have always known that this lurks within me, but I could control it, and my monster slumbered and nothing happened to awake it. Then I met you… and I felt my monster stir and become half awake when you told me of Lincoln and others you have known and, with your letter, my monster came out of its lair - black, irrational, bigoted, stupid, evil, malevolent. You will never know how terribly corrosive jealousy is; it is a physical pain as though you had swallowed acid or red hot coals. It is the most terrible of feelings. But you can’t help it - at least I can’t. God knows I’ve tried. I don’t want any ex-boyfriends sitting in church when I marry you. On our wedding day, I want nothing but happiness, both for you and me, and I know I won’t be happy if there is a church full of your ex-conquests. When I marry you I will have no past, only a future: I don’t want to drag my past into our future and I don’t want you to do it, either. Remember, I am jealous of you because I love you. You are never jealous of something you don’t care about. OK, enough about jealousy. Now, let me tell you something… I have seen a thousand sunsets and sunrises; on land where it floods forests and mountains with honey-coloured light; at sea where it rises and sets like a blood orange in a multi-coloured nest of cloud, slipping in and out of the vast ocean. I have seen a thousand moons: harvest moons like gold coins, winter moons as white as ice chips, new moons like baby swans’ feathers. I have seen seas as smooth as if painted, coloured like shot silk or blue as a kingfisher or transparent as glass or black and crumpled with foam, moving ponderously and murderously. I have felt winds straight from the South Pole, bleak and wailing like a lost child; winds as tender and warm as a lover’s breath; winds that carried the astringent smell of salt and the death of seaweeds; winds that carried the moist rich smell of a forest floor - the smell of a million flowers. Fierce winds that churned and moved the sea like yeast, or winds that made the waters lap at the shore like a kitten. I have known silence: the cold, earthy silence at the bottom of a newly dug well; the implacable stony silence of a deep cave; the hot, drugged, midday silence when everything is hypnotized and stilled into silence by the eye of the sun; the silence when great music ends. I have heard summer cicadas cry so that the sound seems stitched into your bones. I have heard tree frogs in an orchestration as complicated as Bach singing in a forest lit by a million emerald fireflies. I have heard the Keas calling over grey glaciers that groaned to themselves like old people as they inched their way to the sea. I have heard the hoarse street vendor cries of the mating fur seals as they sang to their sleek golden wives, the crisp staccato admonishment of the rattlesnake, the cobweb squeak of the bat and the belling roar of the red deer knee-deep in purple heather. I have heard wolves baying at a winter’s moon, red howlers making the forest vibrate with their roaring cries. I have heard the squeak, purr, and grunt of a hundred multi-coloured reef fishes. I have seen hummingbirds flashing like opals round a tree of scarlet blooms, humming like a top. I have seen flying fish, skittering like quicksilver across the blue waves, drawing silver lines on the surface with their tails. I have seen spoonbills flying home to roost like a scarlet banner across the sky. I have seen whales, black as tar, cushioned on a cornflower blue sea, creating a Versailles of fountain with their breath. I have watched butterflies emerge and sit, trembling, while the sun irons their wings smooth. I have watched tigers, like flames, mating in the long grass. I have been dive-bombed by an angry raven, black and glossy as the Devil’s hoof. I have lain in water warm as milk, soft as silk, while around me played a host of dolphins. I have met a thousand animals and seen a thousand wonderful things… All this I did without you. This was my loss. All this I want to do with you. This will be my gain. All this I would gladly have forgone for the sake of one minute of your company, for your laugh, your voice, your eyes, hair, lips, body, and above all for your sweet, ever-surprising mind which is an enchanting quarry in which it is my privilege to delve
That letter waves a slew of red flags that would make me want to steer clear of the man who wrote it. But if he was anything like Tom Hiddleston, I would probably find myself unable to.
His first wife left him in the middle of the Women's Movement. I wonder why. His second wife was 25 years younger and a devoted fan when they met. I bet the thing that they both loved was that they both had in common was the delusion that he was the best thing since slived bread.
This man could read the installation instructions for a ceiling fan and I would still give him my complete and pure attention because it would be beautiful.
Oh shit i didn’t know i could relate so something that much 😂🙏🏼
❤ Agreed
For sure❤
Agreed.
Yep. You can absolutely taste those words.
Gerald Durrell wrote the funniest book I’ve ever read “My Family and Other Animals”. Simply can’t read it without weeping with laughter. Now it turns out he wrote the funniest, expressive and most beautiful love letter. Such a letter! Oh to be the recipient of such a wonderful, descriptive, human and honest declaration.
Tom Hiddleston reads this wonderfully and brings every breath of love and nuance to life.
There was a quotation from "My Family ..." as a Comprehension question in one of my English exams, as a child. It was the passage about "the courtship dances of the scorpions", and it impressed me so much that I wrote title and author on my hand and, straight after school, rushed off to get it out of the library.
Its the book which made me who i am... Durrell did what God forgot to do ....
he is one of my favourite authors... his cofu trilogy may be "fictional" but very much based on his own experiences.
Obviously I like Tom Hiddleston as much as the next person, but what's truly terrifying about this is knowing that this is a real letter. It is so easy to dismiss romance from film and literature because they are works of fiction... but this is real! How do you move on with life knowing that such great love does exist in the real world? I am incredibly jealous of Gerald Durrell and Lee McGeorge to have loved and been loved like this at least at one point of their lives. I'm left feeling sad and utterly helpless...
I want a strong romance like Durell and McGreorge.
A wise man once said "The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return."
@@Evegalewitz what???
Eden Ahbez...
@@Evegalewitz What on earth does that mean?
You're absolutely right. That's another type of love of the kind a bless and a curse. Maybe one a billion.
I think you can tell that Mr Hiddleston relishes the beauty of the writing!
Agreed.................
11:03 " . . . and seen a thousand wonderful things.
"All this, I did without you. This was my loss.
"All this, I want to do with you. This will be my gain.
"All this, I would gladly have forgone for the sake of one minute of your company."
The most beautiful love letter ever written. (And so brilliantly read by Tom Hiddleston.)
Hiddleston is my favourite in all these letter readings so far. His pace and tone are smooth, his voice is clear, not rushed. He becomes the letter writer.
My parents used to read out loud to us on vacations. The Wind in the Willows, The Chronicles of Narnia, and we acted out A Midsummers Night Dream. I happened to read to my father The Piper at the Gates of Dawn from the Wind and the Willows the night before he passed. Please read out loud more!
So beautiful what you've said is
I adore being read to. And reading to someone, I feel I'm showing love. As I'm single again thank goodness for audio books
I always come back here when i find no hope for love anymore. To remind myself that this kind of love does existㅡ not in literary fiction but in real life! To experience such thing even for one lifetime would be considered such a great gift one can possess. I truly hope that the love we yearns for finds us in time that we are still able to explore one another. Love in the right time ❤
11:03 ♡♡♡
I m not sure about how many times I m gonna listen to this
even not sure to which I m more addicted either Tom Hiddleston's voice or Gerald Durrell's words 💖💖💖💖💖
Same feelings.
I'm addicted to Tom Hiddleston reading Gerald Durell's word, one of the most beautiful combination.
I'd say both...
For me it’s Durrell’s word, he’s one of my favourite writers.
A bit of both.
What a gentle and lovely man.
Tom could read the Terms and Conditions like a bedtime story and I'd drift off to heaven.
Even if this was the most beautiful love letter ever written, and it was read to me with Tom' Hiddleston's irresistible voice, at the mention of serious jealousy my only thought was: RUN!
It's interesting. He doesn't ever describe acting upon it. Just that it devours him. That is what jealousy does - destroy happiness like a worm - invisible but inexorable.
Yet they stayed together for many many years. Love conquers all.
The amount of respect and love i have for this man :(
A truly beautiful letter from a truly talented writer. Many would take the jealousy thing as BIG RED FLAG these days. But they lived and loved happily for many many years. Love conquers all. Tom Hiddleston really did this letter justice in his reading of it.
Hiddleston is one of my favorite actors. This reading, his tone and depth of feeling, is the most fervent expression of love I have ever heard from someone, other than the man I loved for over 30 years. I wanted to see everything, hear everything and experience every thing with him. How fortunate that I was able to do so for so long!
I really enjoyed the other comments. I, too, would happily listen to Tom Hiddleston read an instruction manual!
Gerald Durrell has written many non-fiction books about his crazy life as a wildlife conservationist (that I highly recommend), and this lovely letter is very reminiscent of the weaving of beautiful imagery in those. As a kid, Durrell brought me so close to those far away places I could almost _smell_ them. A fantastic read by Tom, I was just as transported by his voice!
Durrell's wife Lee is in many of the later books, if anyone is curious about seeing her interact and speak through Gerry's view of her (and deal with all their many, many animals lol).
Oh, I'm his greatest fan. Right now, I'm reading 'The New Noah'. A great book as always. Leaning a lot about animal behavior.
I really love ''letters live'' really really
If Apple would have him doing the voice in Siri app....
cu2524 I would be talking to Siri all the time! ❤️
Well, at least you can set Siri to a male voice and British accent. I have!
Would be the only reason I'd purchase an Apple product.
@@princessbeexxxx same here
I'm in love with this letter and Tom's reading
i have no words for this man. he's so poetic either reading from a book or not, the way he speaks is so calming and romantic
By acting like that, he catches strongly our attention. He knows his job.
Simply brilliant. It is very sad that there is a dearth of men acknowledging they have experienced this beautiful piece of writing. It's as if to express love and to comprehend its beauty makes men weak. It is sad that such a terrible affliction burdens my sex.
I loved one man for many years who was unafraid of his own vulnerability. He was aware of how strong he was because of it.
The second most beautiful love letter ever written! How can I not envy two people gifted with such a love? I have never known the experience, but can only hope to call it mine some day. Beautifully read by Tom ensures an even greater degree of awe.
What would be the first, in your opinion?
Whats ur first?
@@pamelasarkar9763 Not the other user but to me, Sullivan Ballou's letter to his wife is devastatingly beautiful. It may not be as vividly poetic but there's something incredibly powerful to the earnestness of this person writing what might be the last words to the love of his life. th-cam.com/video/78SOjurJkHk/w-d-xo.html
Q
Don’t be shy, share what the first one was👀👀 please
After listening to such an amazing delivery of such a work of art from Tom, I can’t help but feel envious of their love. But it is not envy nor jealousy which prevails in ones mind after. It is love. The love that the author of the letter has for the recipient. It is radiating from the letter some of it becoming embedded in our hearts and making us ever so wanting to experience it in the magnitude in which he is.
That made me blush, that made me smile, that made me roll my eyes, that made me tear up, that made me stop breathing. I actually have to recover from that letter (and from his reading of it 🔥).
Mr. Hiddleston reads with such a passionate & personal investment in his desire to communicate effectively the lovely words and experiences possible in this sacred, mysterious, wondrous and frightening world. The letter and the love are wonderful, but somehow even more so is the present-day actor. I want this gallant, erudite
prince among men to be immortal.
On this day, we are living thru a climate crisis, a global pandemic with herd immunity years into the future; a new great depression; hungry children; wars; a refugee disaster which will only worsen; a dissolute, dangerous and ignoble American administration and now, social and racial unrest for the murders of too many people of color by the police. So I turn away presently from the many wondrous books, gardens, animals and family to this reading-for relief, for the remembrance of joy this gentleman imparts.
Have you thought about writing poetry/do you write poetry or spoken word? In this comment alone you use words so powerfully
This is the most beautiful thing I've ever heard, and in the most wonderful voice.
I come back to this again and again....... perfection!
That's my Man there. He's so friggin Special! Te AMO mi Amor. 💖💖
I listen to this atleast once a week cause it calms me😍 his voice is so, so wonderful 🥰
#Beautiful, awsome voice......
July 31st, 1978
My darling McGeorge,
You said that things seemed clearer when they were written down. Well, herewith is a very boring letter in which I will try and put everything down so that you may read and re-read it in horror at your folly in getting involved with me. Deep breath.
To begin with, I love you with a depth and passion that I have felt for no one else in this life and if it astonishes you it astonishes me as well. Not - I hasten to say - because you are not worth loving. Far from it. It’s just that, first of all, I swore I would not get involved with another woman. Secondly, I have never had such a feeling before and it is almost frightening. Thirdly, I would never have thought it possible that another human being could occupy my waking (and sleeping) thoughts to the exclusion of almost everything else.
Fourthly, I never thought that - even if one was in love - one could get so completely besotted with another person so that a minute away from them felt like a thousand years.
Fifthly, I never hoped, aspired, dreamed that one could find everything one wanted in a person. I was not such an idiot as to believe this was possible. Yet, in you, I have found everything I want: you are beautiful, gay, giving, gentle, idiotically and deliciously feminine, sexy, wonderfully intelligent and wonderfully silly as well. I want nothing else in this life than to be with you, to listen and watch you - your beautiful voice, your beauty - to argue with you, to laugh with you, to show you things and share things with you, to explore your magnificent mind, to explore your wonderful body, to help you, protect you, serve you, and bash you on the head when I think you are wrong… not to put too fine a point on it I consider that I am the only man outside mythology to have found the crock of gold at the rainbow’s end.
But - having said all that - let us consider things in detail. Don’t let this become public but… well, I have one or two faults. Minor ones, I hasten to say. For example, I am inclined to be overbearing. I do it for the best possible motives (all tyrants say that) but I do tend (without thinking) to tread people underfoot. You must tell me when I am doing it to you, my sweet, because it can be a very bad thing in a marriage.
Right. Second blemish. This, actually, is not so much a blemish of character as a blemish of circumstance. Darling, I want you to be you in your own right, and I will do everything I can to help you in this. But you must take into consideration that I am also me in my own right and that I have a headstart on you… what I am trying to say is that you mustn’t feel offended if you are sometimes treated simply as my wife. (Always remember that what you lose on the swings, you gain on the roundabouts). But, I am an established creature in the world, and so - on occasions - you will have to live in my shadow. Nothing gives me less pleasure than this but it is a fact of life that has to be faced.
Third (and very important and nasty) blemish: jealousy. I don’t think you know what jealousy is - thank God - in the real sense of the word. I know you have felt jealousy over Lincoln’s wife and child but this is what I call normal jealousy, and this - to my regret - is not what I’ve got. What I have got is a black monster that can pervert my good sense, my good humour and any goodness that I have in my make-up. It is really a Jekyll and Hyde situation… my Hyde is stronger than my good sense and defeats me, hard though I try. As I told you, I have always known that this lurks within me, but I could control it, and my monster slumbered and nothing happened to awake it. Then I met you… and I felt my monster stir and become half awake when you told me of Lincoln and others you have known and, with your letter, my monster came out of its lair - black, irrational, bigoted, stupid, evil, malevolent. You will never know how terribly corrosive jealousy is; it is a physical pain as though you had swallowed acid or red hot coals. It is the most terrible of feelings. But you can’t help it - at least I can’t. God knows I’ve tried. I don’t want any ex-boyfriends sitting in church when I marry you. On our wedding day, I want nothing but happiness, both for you and me, and I know I won’t be happy if there is a church full of your ex-conquests. When I marry you I will have no past, only a future: I don’t want to drag my past into our future and I don’t want you to do it, either. Remember, I am jealous of you because I love you. You are never jealous of something you don’t care about. OK, enough about jealousy.
Now, let me tell you something… I have seen a thousand sunsets and sunrises; on land where it floods forests and mountains with honey-coloured light; at sea where it rises and sets like a blood orange in a multi-coloured nest of cloud, slipping in and out of the vast ocean. I have seen a thousand moons: harvest moons like gold coins, winter moons as white as ice chips, new moons like baby swans’ feathers.
I have seen seas as smooth as if painted, coloured like shot silk or blue as a kingfisher or transparent as glass or black and crumpled with foam, moving ponderously and murderously.
I have felt winds straight from the South Pole, bleak and wailing like a lost child; winds as tender and warm as a lover’s breath; winds that carried the astringent smell of salt and the death of seaweeds; winds that carried the moist rich smell of a forest floor - the smell of a million flowers. Fierce winds that churned and moved the sea like yeast, or winds that made the waters lap at the shore like a kitten.
I have known silence: the cold, earthy silence at the bottom of a newly dug well; the implacable stony silence of a deep cave; the hot, drugged, midday silence when everything is hypnotized and stilled into silence by the eye of the sun; the silence when great music ends.
I have heard summer cicadas cry so that the sound seems stitched into your bones. I have heard tree frogs in an orchestration as complicated as Bach singing in a forest lit by a million emerald fireflies. I have heard the Keas calling over grey glaciers that groaned to themselves like old people as they inched their way to the sea. I have heard the hoarse street vendor cries of the mating fur seals as they sang to their sleek golden wives, the crisp staccato admonishment of the rattlesnake, the cobweb squeak of the bat and the belling roar of the red deer knee-deep in purple heather. I have heard wolves baying at a winter’s moon, red howlers making the forest vibrate with their roaring cries. I have heard the squeak, purr, and grunt of a hundred multi-coloured reef fishes.
I have seen hummingbirds flashing like opals round a tree of scarlet blooms, humming like a top. I have seen flying fish, skittering like quicksilver across the blue waves, drawing silver lines on the surface with their tails. I have seen spoonbills flying home to roost like a scarlet banner across the sky. I have seen whales, black as tar, cushioned on a cornflower blue sea, creating a Versailles of fountain with their breath. I have watched butterflies emerge and sit, trembling, while the sun irons their wings smooth. I have watched tigers, like flames, mating in the long grass. I have been dive-bombed by an angry raven, black and glossy as the Devil’s hoof. I have lain in water warm as milk, soft as silk, while around me played a host of dolphins. I have met a thousand animals and seen a thousand wonderful things…
All this I did without you. This was my loss.
All this I want to do with you. This will be my gain.
All this I would gladly have forgone for the sake of one minute of your company, for your laugh, your voice, your eyes, hair, lips, body, and above all for your sweet, ever-surprising mind which is an enchanting quarry in which it is my privilege to delve.
13
I don’t know if I’m more in love with the letter and it’s wonderful words…or Tom reading it 💗🌟😉
Amazing letter. To think that this man Gerald Durrell was born in my hometown, a very small town in India. The words are so amazing, so beautiful, so touching. And Tom Hiddleston? What can one say about him that hasn’t already been said?
Listening to this for the 100th times and truly understanding this letter is absolutely beautiful
I miss the cut glass British accent, I hope it never dies out - especially in actors :(
Certain people have the talent to capture imagination so richly in their expressions. This is one such letter. I literally, being a former literature student, rushed back to reading John Keats' love letter to Fanny Brawne after listening to this one.
I think Letters Live can incorporate Keats' letters, maybe. It won't be a bad idea for sure.
This is just so precious... Love letters as well at Tom reading them... His voice and the way he does it, its just... precious 🤗
How that man could write! Every bit as poetic as his brother Lawrence. Not sure if he would really have given up all the wonders he’d seen for this new young love but thank God he wrote it. And beautifully read of course!
how do these not have more views? this is amazing, historically, a time pre social media, and its the best actors today reading these letters. its also funny as hell.
There's another version of it on here somewhere that has about 500k views
I love his voice.
Beautiful letter, beautifully read, and there’s something about the way Tom Hiddleston says “your body” … my god. Shivers.
There I was listening to a letter...and as the seconds went by I felt that time was standing still. All I could hear inside my soul was an hypnotic voice wonderfully reciting the most beautiful words of love I had ever heard..it left me thinking ..love does exist after all and it must be amazing!!!
I'd just like to add that this letter was not in vain. Gerard and Lee did get married and stayed married until Gerard's death.
Mr. Durrell could write to me all day. What a beautiful and elegant letter. Such passion for another. Just marvelous. 💕💕
Well read Tom Hiddleston! Beautiful voice❤️
Absolutely beautiful word and such mellifluous voice ❤️❤️
Gaaaahhhhhh!!!!!!! The English language is a beautiful tool in the hands of a crafts person is it not? Whether it’s the writer of the prose or the speaker of the lines. This was utterly delicious to listen to. 🥰
Most of us will never have such worldly experience, nor describe it in such wonderful ways..
But to say "I love you" into other's eyes.. that is the great adventure.
Not only the letter makes me touched, but his accent and voice of speaking is also very impressive as well.
As a polyamorous person, I don't think I fully understand this jealousy feeling, but this was a great painting. 😊
Get you a Gerald Durrell
(Or a Tom Hiddleston bless him)
Gerald Durrell! When I was 12 years old, my high school class was given 'The Bafut Beagles' to read as a set book for English Literature. I have been hooked ever since. My favorite book of his is 'The Stationary Ark' which sets out his views on conservation. Read it (if you can get hold of a copy). Then visit Jersey Zoo if you can.
He was twenty years older. Later wrote another letter or card, on a birthday, in his own words when she turned 'a half sixty' (30) and he was 'a half hundred' (50) years of age.
I tell a lie, perhaps he said he had already been half fifty by then. Even more age difference.
Cancel him!😅
Tom oh Tom... How can I not love you
An incredibly beautiful love letter (had my wife and I in tears) read by an incredibly gifted reader.
How not surprised I am to find a poet resides in his soul. May you always have fair winds and calm seas sir, RIP.
Aww, Lee McGeorge is from Memphis, TN, my home town.
Realy love His voice
Sending a Hugs to tom Hiddleston ! ♥️
Beautiful writing extremely well interpreted. Love it. Will listen times
The voice can't help!! I can hear all day!n
En tiempos líquidos,un mar de buen sonido(su voz) y una carta insuperable.⭐🌹
oh my god. I am not a romantic but hearing Tom Hiddleston read such a letter as that one - I have to go and lie down now ❤️
Thomas,,,you can read anything..and I'm always listening..
You can see the kind of guy Tom is that he turns round to narrate to those behind him.Good one,bru.
Today I was having a bad day and now I just feel better
What a wonderful exposition not only on love but on jealousy in all it's dangerous glory!
That actor should be the new James Bond.
Beauty on beauty about beauty. Thanks - for the reading, for the posting. For Gerald Durrell. My God. Talk about any endangered species. But can an individual like this be properly described as a species? Yes, because there were also Shakespeare and Mozart and Leonard Cohen. Merci.
What a touching interpretation from #TomHiddleston #LoveLetters ❤ Toms voice is breathtaking 🎶🎙❤ We need more of #TomHiddlestonsVoice
Where can I find a man who will write me letters like that? WOW! And I want Tom Huddleston to read it to me. Good lord, read me a phone book.
Writing great love letters is a dying art. Someone should post some drivel written in the language of texting ( if you can call it that ). Compared to this lovely letter that would be hysterical.
he can read the dictionary to me and it wont be boring at all.
Wowwww....the letter is so beautiful🥰🥰🥰and more so with the voice of the hot,talented,smart,classy and amazing tom Hiddleston🥰🥰🥰🥰 💚💚💚💚
How good is this
For some reason, as soon as Tom read the passage about Jekyll and Hyde I could totally see him in that role, like Spencer Tracy.
"I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate."
~Gerard Durrel.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
i wish he would do audio books 🥺
He does, some are on YT (The Red Necklace, High Rise); he also reads poetry.
Love echoing through space and time 💕
😍🥰☺️Love you so much Tom!!! You’re the best forever & ever
I felt a love like that one time, it was mutual. It made me choke on it that much harder when it all came to an end.
Brilliantly read. Thank you so much for this.
How to learn English and delight to all your senses ❤
What a read ❤
It gets me every time
I hope to find love like that one day.
So beautiful ❤
You said that things seemed clearer when they were written down. Well, herewith is a very boring letter in which I will try and put everything down so that you may read and re-read it in horror at your folly in getting involved with me. Deep breath.
To begin with, I love you with a depth and passion that I have felt for no one else in this life and if it astonishes you it astonishes me as well. Not - I hasten to say - because you are not worth loving. Far from it. It’s just that, first of all, I swore I would not get involved with another woman. Secondly, I have never had such a feeling before and it is almost frightening. Thirdly, I would never have thought it possible that another human being could occupy my waking (and sleeping) thoughts to the exclusion of almost everything else.
Fourthly, I never thought that - even if one was in love - one could get so completely besotted with another person so that a minute away from them felt like a thousand years.
Fifthly, I never hoped, aspired, dreamed that one could find everything one wanted in a person. I was not such an idiot as to believe this was possible. Yet, in you, I have found everything I want: you are beautiful, gay, giving, gentle, idiotically and deliciously feminine, sexy, wonderfully intelligent and wonderfully silly as well. I want nothing else in this life than to be with you, to listen and watch you - your beautiful voice, your beauty - to argue with you, to laugh with you, to show you things and share things with you, to explore your magnificent mind, to explore your wonderful body, to help you, protect you, serve you, and bash you on the head when I think you are wrong… not to put too fine a point on it I consider that I am the only man outside mythology to have found the crock of gold at the rainbow’s end.
But - having said all that - let us consider things in detail. Don’t let this become public but… well, I have one or two faults. Minor ones, I hasten to say. For example, I am inclined to be overbearing. I do it for the best possible motives (all tyrants say that) but I do tend (without thinking) to tread people underfoot. You must tell me when I am doing it to you, my sweet, because it can be a very bad thing in a marriage.
Right. Second blemish. This, actually, is not so much a blemish of character as a blemish of circumstance. Darling, I want you to be you in your own right, and I will do everything I can to help you in this. But you must take into consideration that I am also me in my own right and that I have a headstart on you… what I am trying to say is that you mustn’t feel offended if you are sometimes treated simply as my wife. (Always remember that what you lose on the swings, you gain on the roundabouts). But, I am an established creature in the world, and so - on occasions - you will have to live in my shadow. Nothing gives me less pleasure than this but it is a fact of life that has to be faced.
Third (and very important and nasty) blemish: jealousy. I don’t think you know what jealousy is - thank God - in the real sense of the word. I know you have felt jealousy over Lincoln’s wife and child but this is what I call normal jealousy, and this - to my regret - is not what I’ve got. What I have got is a black monster that can pervert my good sense, my good humour and any goodness that I have in my make-up. It is really a Jekyll and Hyde situation… my Hyde is stronger than my good sense and defeats me, hard though I try. As I told you, I have always known that this lurks within me, but I could control it, and my monster slumbered and nothing happened to awake it. Then I met you… and I felt my monster stir and become half awake when you told me of Lincoln and others you have known and, with your letter, my monster came out of its lair - black, irrational, bigoted, stupid, evil, malevolent. You will never know how terribly corrosive jealousy is; it is a physical pain as though you had swallowed acid or red hot coals. It is the most terrible of feelings. But you can’t help it - at least I can’t. God knows I’ve tried. I don’t want any ex-boyfriends sitting in church when I marry you. On our wedding day, I want nothing but happiness, both for you and me, and I know I won’t be happy if there is a church full of your ex-conquests. When I marry you I will have no past, only a future: I don’t want to drag my past into our future and I don’t want you to do it, either. Remember, I am jealous of you because I love you. You are never jealous of something you don’t care about. OK, enough about jealousy.
Now, let me tell you something… I have seen a thousand sunsets and sunrises; on land where it floods forests and mountains with honey-coloured light; at sea where it rises and sets like a blood orange in a multi-coloured nest of cloud, slipping in and out of the vast ocean. I have seen a thousand moons: harvest moons like gold coins, winter moons as white as ice chips, new moons like baby swans’ feathers.
I have seen seas as smooth as if painted, coloured like shot silk or blue as a kingfisher or transparent as glass or black and crumpled with foam, moving ponderously and murderously.
I have felt winds straight from the South Pole, bleak and wailing like a lost child; winds as tender and warm as a lover’s breath; winds that carried the astringent smell of salt and the death of seaweeds; winds that carried the moist rich smell of a forest floor - the smell of a million flowers. Fierce winds that churned and moved the sea like yeast, or winds that made the waters lap at the shore like a kitten.
I have known silence: the cold, earthy silence at the bottom of a newly dug well; the implacable stony silence of a deep cave; the hot, drugged, midday silence when everything is hypnotized and stilled into silence by the eye of the sun; the silence when great music ends.
I have heard summer cicadas cry so that the sound seems stitched into your bones. I have heard tree frogs in an orchestration as complicated as Bach singing in a forest lit by a million emerald fireflies. I have heard the Keas calling over grey glaciers that groaned to themselves like old people as they inched their way to the sea. I have heard the hoarse street vendor cries of the mating fur seals as they sang to their sleek golden wives, the crisp staccato admonishment of the rattlesnake, the cobweb squeak of the bat and the belling roar of the red deer knee-deep in purple heather. I have heard wolves baying at a winter’s moon, red howlers making the forest vibrate with their roaring cries. I have heard the squeak, purr, and grunt of a hundred multi-coloured reef fishes.
I have seen hummingbirds flashing like opals round a tree of scarlet blooms, humming like a top. I have seen flying fish, skittering like quicksilver across the blue waves, drawing silver lines on the surface with their tails. I have seen spoonbills flying home to roost like a scarlet banner across the sky. I have seen whales, black as tar, cushioned on a cornflower blue sea, creating a Versailles of fountain with their breath. I have watched butterflies emerge and sit, trembling, while the sun irons their wings smooth. I have watched tigers, like flames, mating in the long grass. I have been dive-bombed by an angry raven, black and glossy as the Devil’s hoof. I have lain in water warm as milk, soft as silk, while around me played a host of dolphins. I have met a thousand animals and seen a thousand wonderful things…
All this I did without you. This was my loss.
All this I want to do with you. This will be my gain.
All this I would gladly have forgone for the sake of one minute of your company, for your laugh, your voice, your eyes, hair, lips, body, and above all for your sweet, ever-surprising mind which is an enchanting quarry in which it is my privilege to delve
Very interesting.. You help me through your post of whole letter, to understand line by line this beautiful letter Which is read mellifluously.
Thank you for taking the time to write out and punctate all of this!
Fucking goosebumps and tears in the end
This is my favorite part !
Tom!!!!!! ❤❤❤😍😍😘
This makes me cry. Periodt
its my fav one. so good
Letters, a lost art for many. Replaced by pointless Facebook posts or texts full of misspellings :(
Holy shit! This is unreal!
Te amo Tom Hiddleston
Voice❤❤😍📖📚
A beautiful letter. That being said, I hope the lady ran, not walked, to her nearest exit.
hahahaha I thought the exact same 😂 There are too many red flags...
No, She married him.
They had a successful marriage
That letter waves a slew of red flags that would make me want to steer clear of the man who wrote it. But if he was anything like Tom Hiddleston, I would probably find myself unable to.
His first wife left him in the middle of the Women's Movement. I wonder why. His second wife was 25 years younger and a devoted fan when they met. I bet the thing that they both loved was that they both had in common was the delusion that he was the best thing since slived bread.
Te amoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo lokiiiiiiiii ❤eres el amor de mi vida. ❤️