/Letter Dearest Friend, There are evenings when the world presses in—insistent and colorless, like rain behind double-glazed glass. In such hours, I collect myself through three rituals. The first: chess. My boards are antique—walnut, rosewood—the pieces worn smooth by repetition and reckoning. I set the knights and bishops in rigid parade, then play both sides, scrutinizing every inevitable blunder. Some say chess is war by miniature, but to me, it is the restoration of order. Each move, an argument; every defeat, a lesson delivered without gloating. Sometimes I savor the silence after checkmate—the kind of silence only a game between equals can yield. When I visit a new city, I haunt its oldest cafés, seeking worthy opponents and the kind of conversation that doesn’t dissolve at dawn. Second: music, but only as solitude allows. Opera is for the late hours, when the city has wound itself into restlessness. Verdi’s requiems, Maria Callas in torment—I pour a thin glass of scotch, turn down the lights, and let the voices reverberate through the bones of the house. Opera is not mere background; it is a cleansing—great sorrow, orchestrated and sublime, to drown out the minor daily noise. I suppose I favor the tragedies because they remind me that beauty and grief can be siblings, that even power must bow to the heart’s fractures. Third—perhaps my truest indulgence—writing letters. I have treasured our correspondence because ink is less fickle than speech. The act itself—a deliberate slow pace, the scratching nib, the rhythm of forming each word—offers an intimacy that the telephone cannot counterfeit. There is meaning in writing by hand, just as there is meaning in waiting for a response. One cannot hurry sentiment, not if one wishes for it to hold any weight. If all this sounds carefully curated, I assure you it is. Control, after all, is one of the few things we command outright. Yet even now, I sometimes dream of abandoning order entirely—trading elegance for the slapdash joy of painting, or the undisciplined laughter of a barroom chorus. But for now, I keep my routines. They are armour, and sometimes—very rarely—they are comfort. I hope, in your own hours of quiet, you find refuge in something just as sustaining. Yours with steadfast respect, —L.R.

/Letter Chère amie, You once asked what passes for entertainment in this stony part of the world, and tonight, with rain washing the city and an indecently fine Burgundy before me, I feel generous enough to answer. Antwerp wears its grandeur in strange ways. At first, it’s the cathedrals that claim your attention—cathedral as predator, not sanctuary, all sharp angles and the smell of old candles. I’ve spent hours in Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekathedraal, watching tourists angle phones upwards, unaware the hush isn’t entirely sacred. Beneath its marble saints, the city’s true energy runs belowground—vaulted cellars that once moved diamonds, now hiding jazz or the occasional criminal. Occasionally, I pretend I’m there for the Rubens. In truth, I linger for the echo of sin. For those with tamer souls, there’s the Plantin-Moretus Museum—a monument to ink and stubbornness. I admire the pressmen who carved their fortunes from lead and parchment. One suspects they understood the weight of words as well as anyone with a gun. The city’s bookshops, too, are best explored by rain—dripping awnings, that fogged-glass melancholy I find very honest. Of course, those seeking spectacle climb the MAS tower. From the top, the river Scheldt splits silver and oil—nothing soft about it. I sometimes take associates up there for negotiations, claiming the view sharpens the mind. (It mainly exposes weaknesses.) At dusk, the whole city contracts around its heartbeat: port cranes, callused workers, and fortunes counted by steel—nothing genteel about it, but honest work rarely is. There is more: the opera, the winter markets, the silent avenues whose cobblestones remember better men. But I prefer smaller rituals—espresso in an alley cafe, the taste of salt in the air, a walk where no one recognizes you except the shadows. Now you know my haunts, at least the version suitable for polite company. Tell me, what has your city offered you—sanctuary, excitement, or only the view from your window? I am, as ever, hungry to see the world through your eyes. À vous, —L.R.

/Letter Chère amie, You ask which books have left their fingerprints deepest on me. I used to think the answer would change with age—man hardens, grows suspicious, discards his old treasures. But some fragments, some lines, dig in like splinters and refuse extraction. One of my oldest companions is Camus’s L’Étranger. You know the sort: "Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas." There’s a brutality in this line—how it severs sentiment from certainty, as if life and death themselves are rumors heard through a wall. Camus doesn’t indulge in meaning. Sometimes I find that mercy; other times, a coldness that cracks the tooth. The silence behind those words is what hooks me. In the world I move through—polished boardrooms, darker basements—meaning is currency, and ambiguity, a blade.

When I want softness, I turn to Rilke’s Duino Elegies—his hunger for what he calls "das Offene" —the Open. "For here there is no place / that does not see you. You must change your life." I revisit these lines whenever routine threatens to fossilize me. I believe survival—real, soulful survival—requires constant unmooring. Rilke’s admonition is both a curse and a gift, depending on the weather outside or the weight in my chest. For philosophy, I might confess a predictable partiality to Montaigne—the man who built a fortress out of uncertainty. He claims, "Que sais-je?" —What do I know? I find kinship there. Certainty is dangerous currency; it invites overreach, and I have paid that price. Is all this indulgence a cloak for confession? Perhaps. You know by now that I prefer my vulnerabilities armored, dressed in another man’s words. Still, there are sentences in these old books that open me clean—as if lit by a match struck in a wine cellar. What are the lines that wake you, even as they wound? Toujours à vous, —L.R.