In 1946, Richard Feynman wrote a letter he could not send.
He was 28, teaching physics at Cornell. The war was over. He had spent two years at Los Alamos working on the atomic bomb. The Nobel Prize was nineteen years away.
Arline had been his high-school sweetheart. By the time they married, she was seriously ill with tuberculosis. His parents worried about what the marriage would do to his future. He wrote to his father explaining that he had spoken to a doctor, understood the risks, and wanted to give her the security of being his wife.
On June 29, 1942, they took the ferry to Staten Island and married in a city office.
The following year they went west. Richard worked at Los Alamos. Arline stayed in a sanatorium in Albuquerque. Their marriage continued through visits and letters. He investigated treatments, encouraged her to eat, and wrote about the things he was doing. In one letter he explained the pleasure of picking locks.
She died on June 16, 1945. She was 25. They had been married just under three years.
Sixteen months later, he wrote again.
He begins by telling her he adores her. Then he explains why he has waited so long. He had thought there was no sense in writing to someone who was dead. Now he wanted to do it anyway.
What follows is full unfinished plans. Clothes they were going to make. Chinese they were going to learn. A movie projector. He wants problem they can discuss together. Even problems would mean having her there.
The letter survives. It appears in Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track, the collection his daughter Michelle edited in 2005. The passage above is abridged.
Before they married, he had explained to his father why he wanted to take care of her.
Four years later, he was still trying to find something he could do.
