Félix J. Palma

For if you succeed in making this girl laugh, if you make her laughter ring in the air like a fountain of silver coins cascading to the floor, you will win her heart forever.

Before cruelly vilifying them from a great height, the mudslingers at newspapers and journals should bear in mind that all artistic endeavors were by and large a mixture of effort and imagination, the embodiment of a solitary endeavor, of a sometimes long-nurtured dream, when they were not a desperate bid to give life meaning.

I am an artist. And An artist is simply a man who is pulled along by a river: on one side sanity lies, and the other madness, yet he will find no peace on either, as the current of his art drags him away from the everyday life on it's banks, where others watch, unable to help him until he reaches the immensity of the ocean.

But first you have to fight, to try other ways. If your life displeases you, my lad, try to change it. Don't give in to defeat so easily. Death is the only sure defeat. It is the end of everything.

Please write an ending where the Martians are defeated. Don't take away your readers' hope.

...but there are stories that cannot begin at their beginning, and perhaps this is one of them.

And so everything depends on you, Bertie. Bishop or rook. Your life or mine. Do what you believe you have to do.

Because between doing something and doing nothing, this is all I can do.

Perhaps you would have preferred it if I had not written you any letter. Perhaps you would have liked it better if I had let you meet your fate unprepared. After all, what awaits you is not all that bad and even contains moments of happiness, as you have seen. But if I wrote to you, it is because somehow I feel this is not the life you should live. Indeed, perhaps you should stay in the past, living happily with Jane and turning me into a successful writer who knows nothing about journeys through time, not real ones anyway. For me it is too late, of course, I cannot choose a different life, but you can. You can still choose between your life and the life I have just recounted to you, between going on being Bertie or becoming me. In the end, that is what time travel gives us, a second chance, the opportunity to go back and do things differently.