Rilke

Rilke's writing is my salve for ill feelings toward humanity. I read The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge years ago, and no book since has been more important to me. I remember how sad and angry I was at the time, sitting alone smoking on the porch of my friend's house that I was sub-letting while he was in Antarctica. I had just finished college, and it seemed like the everything I knew and loved was slowly withdrawing to someplace remote and emotionally far away from me.

Why on earth was my friend in Antarctica, and why was I living in his empty house? How could I possibly survive the terrifying and lonely cube land existence I had entered into since finishing college and finding employment? Each sentence I read of the Notebooks seemed both foreign and as if I had know it my whole life. A salve.

As for Rilke himself - - magnificently peculiar, child-like, unremittingly bewitched - who is all breath and flutter. His is the voice you heard by your bedside when you were a child.