Colonial epistolary self-fashioning constantly broke under the writer’s emotional strain

Evidence

Erupting between these selves—punctuated with apologies for too much emoting, what he calls an “excess of sadness,” and too much display (“please forgive me Suze for my last letter in which I should have contained myself better”)—were acerbic asides, attempts at humor, the inadvertent slip of a lonely, depressed and partly delusional man. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1468