an unfinished opinion

Dear friend (or future me), It’s cloudy this morning, which after weeks of heat feels like a favour from somebody. It’s a little humid, but bearable. I’ve brought my tea out to the step and forgotten it, so it sits cold beside me, and I drink it anyway. I keep promising to tell you about Letters to a Young Poet, and I keep waiting until I have a proper opinion of it. I don’t have one yet. It’s short, just ten letters from a poet not much older than the one he was writing to, and I think I’ll be absorbing it for years. The young man had sent Rilke some of his poems and asked whether they were any good. Rilke was twenty-seven, still becoming the poet we know today, and he declined to answer. He wrote back that no one could advise him, that the only way was inward. He told him to ask himself whether he must write, whether the need reached down to the roots of his life, and if the answer was a plain, strong yes, to build his whole life around it. I read that and had to put the book down.…