Rosemary Kirstein

Columbus Day found the library closed, naturally.   So, given that the DayJob tasks were backed up due to some accounting disasters the previous week, what better time to put in a little catch-up overtime?

Bad idea!  A little turned into a lot, and I dragged out of there at 7PM, managed to get to the gym, and that was it.   I consider that day wasted, except for the gym.  During which I was reading Catherynne M. Valente’s The Girl Who Fell  Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There.    Time spent reading Valente is never wasted.    As I believe I have said before.

So, now I have to gain my momentum back.   Ack!

Meanwhile, back at the Library today:

What unsettled him was the growing realization that all through his life the claims of others had been laid not so much on his time as on his inner stores of regard and love.  His need, if he was finally to achieve the “great work”, was to find someone whom he could love without being loved in return to reach that apotheosis of love in which the Portuguese nun, or his Prodigal Son in Malte, had found  their happiness.

— A Ringing Glass, the Life of Rainer Maria Rilke, by Donald Prater, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1986

“Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, separate, in the evening.” - Rilke

Of Rilke, all I’ve read is Letters to a Young Poet and The Notebooks of Malte  Laurids Brigge.