Letters Live: "All this I did without you" read by Tom Hiddleston (2015)

[@nicolajackman2809]

I do so hope that this wonderful reading of Gerald Durrell's letter encourages listeners to seek out Gerald Durrell's books which are, each and every one of them, an utter delight: informative, magical and extremely funny

[@carabiner7999]

I loved them as a child and was not terribly upset by the television series you can currently watch on Amazon. It's actually filmed in the house where the Durrells lived, as the main location, if I recall. Quite a beautifully shot and a wonderful cast.

[@FraBi776]

@@carabiner7999, what series is that?

[@bethmcminn9018]

@@FraBi776 The Durrells in Corfu. Keeley Hawes is wonderful as the mom. The entire cast is great.

[@MennoY0uTube]

To be honest, it doesn't. This dreariness should never be extended over more than the amount of pages already spent on this letter.

[@patstocker3658]

I love Gerald’s books, also the Alexandrian Quartet by his brother Laurence. From Gerald’s version of L. I would have thought this letter would be more like a letter Laurence would pen rather than it’s actually author. Ah well that’s wot love does for one I guess

[@dianairungbam3272]

I never get tired of listening to him🥰🥰🥰

[@Debbie338]

God, I cannot get enough of his voice.

[@RainS2TOSBT]

ikr 😁

[@1972hermanoben]

Lee is a wonderful human being. I was privileged to meet her at the Cheltenham Literature Festival some years ago, she complimented me on my reading of an excerpt from G.D’s ‘My Family..’ I’ve never forgotten the impression she made. I was humbled and proud simultaneously, just to be there, which was more than ample reward for the care I’d put into my preparation for the event and so to have Lee make a point of thanking me rather bowled me over. Everyone there was buzzing around Lee afterwards, conducting mini interviews and filling the air with chitchat. Having been marshalled around the room for ages to talk with everyone from sponsors to journalists and Durrell fans, Lee found a quiet moment to buttonhole me nonetheless, and I was utterly charmed. It’s warmed my heart, watching and listening to this beautifully-delivered performance by Tom Hiddleston. Source material such as that letter deserves the sort of quality of expression that an actor of his calibre is capable of, and he brought it to life beautifully. I don’t know whether Lee was there at the time of recording to hear it, but she’d have loved his performance and told him so, I’m sure. As Lee must have been with the original letter in her hands all those years ago, each person in the audience will have been thrilled and deeply moved by the magic of Durrell’s writing. We’re so very lucky, to have his written legacy to show us how to vocalize love in the richly poetic way he did. Letter writing may have fallen out of fashion and been supplanted for day-to-day purposes by emails and text messages but when words and thoughts can be so artfully, beautifully set together, it seems worth putting in the effort to keep our postal services and stationers in business. We may not all possess Gerald Durrell’s skill at setting hearts and imaginations aflame, but the extra love and thought that has to go into the composition and delivery of a written letter will always be worthwhile.

[@Columbusmor]

A beautiful voice reading a beautiful love letter - it simply can't get any better

[@pinkandorangeandyellowswirls]

Omg this poem was so beautiful and even more beautiful in his voice. Imagine being there in person?! Also, this poem was so well spoken that it brought tears to my eyes. I’ve loved poetry ever since I could remember, but have never been able to get good at the spoken meter that is needed to speak such gorgeous lines of poetry. This brought tears to my eyes and soothed my racing heart. Thank you Tom for embracing your skills of the spoken word.

[@julieet52]

Simply beautiful. I love when he speaks about jealousy. so thought provoking. Oh how wonderful it would be to receive a love letter such as this 🌹

[@toramenor]

Wow... Well, if you want someone to read a poetic letter, get Tom Hiddleston. He reads it beautifully

[@d.h.3602]

This is older, but I love to listen to his voice. LoveLetters I wish we would had this every year with #TomHiddleston 's touching voice ❤🎶🎙💋 And he did it sooo special 😁😂 He's such a treasure for the audience !! I love sooo much how he speaks with his hands, face and voice 🤗 TY for sharing

[@gloriahead]

More and more of Mr Hiddelston ❤

[@joycecesario9571]

Beautifully written and spoken...powerfully romantic. Sounds like the depiction of soulful love.

[@orchideebleue5287]

I never tire of listening to his voice. Especially when he speaks so well of love

[@levizain2175]

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.

[@flaviapereyra3585]

Thanks for writing it in english

[@flaviapereyra3585]

❤

[@ryveralexander8511]

Me too, I do everything turns light off, closed eyes and listens, and in different scenarios! 🤣🤗🤗🤗💓💖💗

[@ryveralexander8511]

Levi Zain, thank you, Angel. 🤗🤗🤗💓💖💗

[@ryveralexander8511]

Listening to TH voice is liked bathing with warm milk on the moonlight , his words!🤗🤗🤗🤔

[@jenjen9313]

I always listen to him before going to sleep.

[@anitajordan3856]

Beautiful reading Beautiful letter

[@ennuiStruck]

So enchanting !

[@katewilson3667]

Alas! I find not words nor prose to explain how wonderful this is to me😘

[@Columbusmor]

By God, if I had a penny for each time I've viewed this, I'd be a millionaire!

[@vanessamonti]

Listen to him is a beautiful dream... Is amazing 👏👏👏❤️❤️❤️

[@kimsherlock8969]

I have experienced deep thoughts, in being present . Pure golden note of life .

[@catherineburgon3731]

What a lovely letter , to have someone write something like this for you 💞 listening to him is so calming x

[@trinhcongdieuhuongtran4545]

"All this, I did without You!" Wow! This is pretty deep! Isn't it? It's courageous! It's something, that I've never thought of. It's something, that I haven't dared to drag on so far! To be inlove with someone so passionately, can be freaking scary! Especially if it's love at first sight! I'm still trying to decode what you just read. Yeah, your voice sounded so sweet, for a minute, I felt like someone was speaking directly to me! Oh no!

[@kimsherlock8969]

Listening to letter written by a pen ? Spoken by an Actor feeling for the written words, good prose heard . THANKYOU.

[@jasmineb7106]

A beautiful and intelligent reading. 🌹🌹🌹

[@KW-hk2jd]

Very beautiful. The speaker is very beautiful too:)

[@alexpond648]

Now, this one I like! I truely belive he needs an audience to be brilliant. It animates him. Didn't liked his renditions of poetry I heard on KZbin. His voice is beautiful, but the poems were overpowered with music, effects on his voice and pathos. The poetry could have been a telephonebook read with rhythm.

[@PiaAmorin]

Simply wonderful

[@EweChewBrrr01]

This could be a drinking game. Every time the words "like a" are said go take a shot. You will be blind drunk halfway through this letter if you do.

[@geraldinebaterina2923]

Whew this got recommended and Tom is amazing

[@kazikabir70]

Enchanting

[@KittyClark4433]

Now that ladies & gentlemen is what romance sounds like, what a heart of love for another conveys. A lost art.

[@sabrinahmed5505]

Beautiful. Aesthetic. Sublime. Made my heart leap with every intonation.

[@donikajorgo5612]

Excellent.. Thx

[@johnrowland3105]

Beautiful

[@lillakozek3692]

Zsuzsa, köszi!!!

[@Kobe29261]

The problem has not been with love but desire; desire always demands too much. Lord have mercy on that woman, this man is looking for god - and no woman should be called on to save a soul!

[@silene9803]

Posessive desire by a selfcentered aging narcissist, this has nothing to do with love.

[@Fuchs1978]

They married and stayed that way till his death. So...

[@comealongcomealong4480]

@@Fuchs1978 I know nothing of the couple. Perhaps Lee found his mind (and lifestyle) as engaging as he hers. Also, perhaps she knew her lightness of temperament, her 'femininity' and 'silliness', her physical beauty, would all be a good foil for Gerald's intensity and outbreaks of jealousy.

[@glabrouswashere8078]

But he hasn’t seen C-beams glittering off the Tannhauser Gate!

[@Misraprasenjit]

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

[@mishan3150]

Tnx I love this bcz of Tom Hiddleston's angelic voice Tnx darling

[@Misraprasenjit]

@@mishan3150 #Most Welcome 💐💐........ This letter is a beautiful collection for us, Awsome voice and well reading by Tom Huddleston.

[@silene9803]

Just a pompous, selfabsorbed love bombing by a smart narcissist. I have learned almost nothing about the recipient from this letter - very telling.

[@Misraprasenjit]

@Green Hoodie welcome🙏

[@Theepotheadgirl]

That part on Jealousy. T_T

[@Arkelk2010]

Is there a reply that we know of? It would take a very fine writer to reply in kind.

[@bibphil5078]

The hubris of the letter writer would have left me running for the door.

[@corvuscorone7735]

Hybris?Because he says she will occasionally have to stand in his shadow? Not hybris, plain truth. Gerald Durrell was already famous by the time he married Lee. She wasn't. Now, the thing about the jealousy would have ME running for the door!

[@trisblackshaw1640]

@@corvuscorone7735 He loves her and he's being honest with her. He evidently felt comfortable enough that he could express those feelings to her without her 'running to the door'. From an outsider's perspective, it may sound concerning, but we are viewing a relationship between two people from the outside. Confiding in someone to that degree is perhaps one of the most romantic and moving things I've ever heard.

[@sheilaburns1678]

The authors hubris is more than his comfort telling her about his jealousy. It’s in his expectation that she will take responsibility for it because he can’t control it. Then he follows it up with a decree that she cannot invite anyone to their wedding that she was previously involved with, that even though she may have developed deep non-romantic friendships out of a past love affairs, that those persons can’t be allowed to witness and celebrate this great love with them. That is sad and scary. His great love in other words is possessive and controlling. Then he goes on (and on and on) to describe in great detail all his life experiences, claiming he’s more enamored with her, but volume of word wise, I’m not convinced. He seems most enamored with himself, while being obsessed with her.

[@dannyslammy4379]

It's not hubris ... the letter writer is a worker in words and he has carved from that mountain language a thing of beauty to woo her. Such pomp is not hubris but the natural strut of the peacock - his effort matches what he wants to claim, no less - why not see him as deserving such claim?

[@yellomama]

his eloquent delivery is "i love you"...$...spoken resonance to day dream besottingly school marmy..um ...idiotically shiverring timbers..4 hmmm

[@lcmari95]

Ah this is probably his vows

[@rualert1602]

I hope she was able to get to safety.

[@marthaellenconner98]

♥️♥️💥💥

[@yuouyang4207]

Done

[@CatBloom42]

How interesting that so many people are enamored with this "love" letter. This is an egotistical, manipulative, self-aggrandizing man, talking mostly about himself. It seems romantic on first glance, but underneath that polished surface, it's actually quite creepy. Especially considering that this is a 52 year old man, writing his 28 year old student.

[@Fuchs1978]

"All this I did without you. This was my loss." = All my life, all I love, all I work for is a loss, is nothing... because you were not there.

[@Demitrival]

Why is this poem funny lmaooo

[@senseweaver01]

Just... straight up stole their video and reuploaded it, what

[@ann.abraham.m.22.10]

..ya, and all I did, I did ..inspite.. of er.. someone.. .

[@amywas1]

Anyone saying that this was "awesome" will be taken outside... .

[@waynefeller8824]

- Why would you exit those that were filled with awe as they listened to Mr. Hiddleston reading a letter from a renowned author? By what authority, if any, do you reserve the right to dictate consequences to the words of others?

[@tygressblade]

Every young male should be forced to read this letter.

[@maureenrhysjones4643]

or perhaps every mother should read it to her son at night, when he is 5 years old, so that he can sleep on its memory. It works.