There is a great scene in ‘Rob Roy’ a 1995 film starring Jessica Lange and Liam Neeson. It’s a raw story set in 18th century Scotland with Robert Roy MacGregor, a proud Highlander, taking on the perfidious English. During one I might say very sexy scene set in their stone cabin high in the mountains Liam Neeson says to Jessica “I love the bones of ye.” She melted into his arms and I noted that my own wife was clearly caught up in the moment, wishing perhaps that her own man could find the same overpowering intimacy in his spoken word, with his inner ‘Liam’.

I took note and stored it away for a later time.

I love words and our unique ability to use them, to share our most intimate thoughts. I do and I’ve known a time or two when I was quite persuasive, if I don’t say so myself, which of course I have to say for myself on account of no one, absolutely no one would say that for me.

So when my friend Chris Mazurkewich sent me a story about a woman who had found a treasure chest of intimate love letters dating back to 1910, in the walls of a house she was renovating in Baltimore, I knew I was in for a treat. Writing and expressing ourselves in this uninhibited and exposed way has been lost to the ages, replaced perhaps with nude images of body parts, as seems to to be the modern version of ‘I love the bones of ye’. Most of the private declarations lovers share nowadays are lost in the moment, rarely written down in any form, in part of course because no one knows how to write any more and Lord knows it loses something in a text message or on Tik Tok or Alphabet or some encrypted app. These letters though from so long ago, were spectacular.

My inspiration is of lying upon my back, with closed eyes, and my whole consciousness drawn to one focus — the sensation of your warm mouth fast upon mine.

I have been unable to rid my mind of you in the black thing. Have you been wearing it, by any chance, to hypnotize my thoughts?*

When the letters were published in Baltimore they captured imaginations across the city fueled by a salacious appetite for tales of lust and scandal and fortune if even they were from the 1920’s..

My darling, my darling, I bury my face in you, and strain to me all of you that I can clasp.*

Darling,

I can often kiss you more deliciously elsewhere — in some beautiful curve, or darling spot of my own — but never with that quietly voluminous feeling that in the kiss itself one finds the world.

I shall behave in a way to you utterly asinine.

Goodnight dark eyes and glorious hair.*

They discovered in due course the author of many these private unguarded messages. Turns out he was R.A. Spaeth, a respected expert on colour change in fish and the Gibbon ape.

I love this story. It is a little bit like looking through a keyhole at something we shouldn’t be watching but who among us doesn’t enjoy it if just a little bit. And I love this human capacity we all share for quiet endearments and shared intimacy with words, spoken or written.

Of course I began with a story about Liam Neeson and Jessica Lange and his declaration “I love the bones of ye” and noted how those words had melted all resistance, Jessica collapsing into his arms, the film fulfilling the obligatory ‘sexual content’ warning included in the opening credits:

‘May contain profanity, sexual content and smoking’

And I told you, noted Lothario that I was, I took note and stored it away for a later time, waiting for the perfect ‘Rob Roy’ moment with my wife Mac hoping to melt all resistance, just the way Liam Neesen had,

“Mac, I love your bones.” I said.

And everything came to a screeching halt. I mean everything, replaced by laughter. Not that laughter is a bad thing but in the that moment, in that moment in time, laughter was not what I was hoping for. Nope, not at all. Turns out my ‘Mac I love your bones’ was no match for a kilt wearing Liam Nesson, all 6’4″ of sinew and muscle whispering lustily to his wife “I love the bones of ye” with all the passion of a true Scottish warrior.

Nope. Not even an ‘A’ for effort.

*Credit: Baltimore Banner