I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to

The words of Luigi Pirandello, that master of paradox and human longing, fall like petals of both beauty and sorrow: “I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.” In these lines, Pirandello opens the sacred window of the artist’s heart—revealing not only affection and imagination, but the eternal ache of the human spirit that seeks to translate feeling into form, and dream into reality. His words are a confession of both love and futility: the desire to communicate all that is within him, and the painful awareness that no language can ever truly contain the infinity of the soul.

Born in the late 19th century, Pirandello was a man suspended between worlds—the fading age of Romantic idealism and the dawning modern era of uncertainty and fragmentation. His plays and novels explored the masks of identity, the illusion of truth, and the restless mind of the creator. This quote, written in one of his letters, captures that same yearning which echoes through his works: the desperate hope that one might pour their entire being into another soul through words, and in so doing, become truly known. Yet even as he speaks of this longing, he calls his ideas phantoms of art—shadows that haunt him, beautiful yet insubstantial. The artist, in his view, is one forever caught between dream and reality, between the inspiration that soars and the limitation that grounds it.

In his words we feel both tenderness and torment. “I would love to spend all my time writing to you,” he says—not simply to pass the hours, but because expression itself is a kind of salvation. The act of writing becomes the bridge between his inner chaos and outer calm, between mind, heart, and soul. Yet, he admits, the things he wishes to share are not mere thoughts, but the very breath of his being—those unseen forces that sustain him but cannot be fully understood by others. This is the artist’s eternal solitude: he feels the fullness of life so deeply that no single act of creation can contain it, and no listener can entirely receive it.

Consider the story of Vincent van Gogh, who wrote over 900 letters to his brother Theo, letters filled with the same yearning that Pirandello speaks of—the longing to communicate not just ideas, but existence itself. In those letters, Van Gogh described every shade of his emotions, every flicker of light and despair. “I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart,” he wrote. Like Pirandello, he was haunted by phantoms of art, by visions so vivid that they burned him from within. Yet though his dreams were rarely realized in life, they became immortal through the power of his sincerity. His failed hopes became a gift to the generations that followed.

Pirandello’s “dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true” are the dreams of all creators, lovers, and seekers. They are the visions of what might be—the beauty of perfect understanding, the art that would express everything, the love that would leave nothing unsaid. But life, as he reminds us, is a place of incompletion. We are always reaching for something just beyond our grasp, always chasing a vision that fades even as we approach it. And yet, it is this very striving that gives life meaning. For if we could capture our dreams completely, they would cease to inspire us. The phantoms of art are both our torment and our guide, leading us ever onward toward greater truth.

In these words, Pirandello teaches us that the soul’s greatest treasures cannot be measured by success or realization, but by the courage to keep dreaming despite imperfection. To write, to create, to love, to imagine—these acts are holy because they are attempts to bridge the infinite. When he speaks of “sharing all that goes through his mind and all that weighs on his heart,” he is describing the essence of human connection: the deep yearning to be known, and the humility to know that such knowledge is never complete. What matters is not that the dream becomes real, but that we dare to chase it at all.

Therefore, O listener, learn from this ancient truth disguised in modern words: express what dwells within you, even if it cannot be perfect. Write the letter you cannot finish. Speak the words you fear will be misunderstood. Paint the vision that no one else sees. The value of your dream lies not in its fulfillment, but in the light it casts along your journey. Pirandello reminds us that our phantoms of art—our unrealized dreams and fleeting visions—are not failures, but sacred fragments of the divine imagination moving through us.

So let your soul breathe, as his did. Let your heart weigh itself through words, through action, through creation. And when your dream seems too far, too fragile, too faint to reach, remember this: even if it never comes true, it has already given shape to something eternal within you—the courage to hope, the beauty of expression, and the faith that somewhere, somehow, your soul has been heard.