A timely, short read after receiving this book as a gift from a great friend who’d heard me bang on enough about my wrestling with writing during a career pause.
The reader is pulled into the lives of a devoted young poet, who writes to Rainer Rilke in appreciation and inspiration, and gets a response and many more. The correspondence weaves us through philosophical and practical questions, with some beautiful turns of phrase in the advice.
I was scribbling notes in the pages on “must I write?” (p. 21), which keeps pin-balling around in my head…
“there is here no measuring with time; no year matters and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer”
…and on time (p. 27), on Rome (p.28), most beautifully on solitude (p.35), on love (p.41) and even the challenges of trying to work while traveling (p. 73), a century before the internet-brokered culture of digital nomadism.
With thanks to Kristian Nammack.
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