What can one do, faced with this wonderful tumble of round bright fruits; but gather them and play with them – and become them, as it were. When I pass an apple stall I cannot help stopping and stating until I feel that I, myself, am changing into an apple, too, and that at any moment I can produce an apple, miraculously, out of my own being, like a conjuror produces the egg… When you paint apples do you feel that your breasts and your knees become apples, too? Or do you think this is the greatest nonsense? I don’t. I am sure it is not. When I write about ducks I swear that I am a white duck with the round eye, floating on a pond fringed with yellow-blobs and taking an occasional dart at the other duck with the round eye, which floats upside down beneath me… In fact the whole process of becoming the duck (what Lawrence would perhaps call this consummation with the duck of the apple !) is so thrilling that I can hardly breathe, only to think about it. For although that is as far as most people can get, it is really only the ‘prelude’. There follows the moment when you are more duck, more apple, or more Natasha than any of these objects could ever possibly be, and so you create them anew.
Katherine Mansfield, from a letter to Dorothy Brett, 11th October 1917
What a wonderful excerpt!