Venice, October 1817
Byron arrived in this city last year and has been consuming it at the rate of a man who suspects he has a limited amount of time. We were introduced at a salon on the Giudecca three weeks ago. He is the most exhausting person I have met in fifty years, and that is not a short list.
He plays the damned figure. The immortal outsider. The man marked by something darker than ordinary mortality. He plays it well. It is a compelling performance. The problem, from where I stand, is that it is a performance. He is playing at what I have been living since the Himalayas. There is a difference I cannot fully explain to him without explaining more than I intend.
Early in our acquaintance he made some remark about wishing he could live forever. I looked at him for a long moment. Then I said something that he later wrote about in a letter to a friend without understanding what I had actually been telling him. He described it as meeting a man who seemed to find the idea of immortality genuinely funny, though not in a way that was entirely reassuring. That is accurate.
I will keep a certain distance. But I will not keep away entirely. There is something in Byron worth being in proximity to, even if proximity carries cost. He is doing something real underneath the theater of it. The theater is the way he survives the doing of it. He is thirty years old. He will not see forty. The particular speed at which he burns is not compatible with a long arc.