pazienza

Today i was on the T for an hour and 13 minutes. thats 13 minutes longer than it would have taken me to walk to work. it was 15 minutes creeping along at the Green line's usual glacial speed and then ten minutes at a stand still with the conductor telling us there was "heavy traffic" ahead, then ten yards of movement, ten more minutes at stopped, ten yards, ten minutes etc. i got off at the next stop and walked the rest of the way making me a solid hour late to work.
there is only one reason i did not turn into a screetching monkey and swing up and down the stopped subway car on the hand rails:
Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters To A Young Poet
by a stroke of luck and genius at the last minute on my way out i shoved the book, recently gifted to me by my dads girlfriend, into my bag. its one of those books that i keep dancing around, kind of like pride & prejudice or one flew over the cuckoo's nest, that i really should have read by now and sort of feeeel like i've read just from having heard it quoted or references 2394738 times so i guiltily pass it over in bookstores, imagining there wouldnt be enough surprise in the experience of reading it and there are so many other new books i want to read and i'm almost too embarassed to pick it up and start it because it feels a little like being taught how to tie a shoe and yet this is no goodnight moon were talking about, this is ken kesey and jane austin and many others who i have skipped over due to a false sense of familiaity and in reality one doesnt know a book unless one's read it regardless of how many critical essays one has bashed one's head against and i ought to read them start to finish and fill in the gaping holes in my education so i can stop tripping on my literary shoe laces.
anyway, letters to a young poet has been personally recommended so many times in my life that i cant keep ignoring it so when teh T ground to a halt for the second time i wrenched the book out of my bag and began reading. and reading. and reading. and underlining and flagging and tagging and dogearing and my god how have i lived this long without these words?
i'm only on page 41 and rilke has allready discussed patience, poetry, irony, love, sex and career with words that connected the plug of my heart to the socket of my brain and made both light up.

Here is a passage in which rilke responds to his young correspondant's impatience with his life's direction, his impatience with his ability to do or even find, what he loves doing:

"You are so young, so before all beginning, and i want to beg you, as much as i can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything."

and a poem of his that i really enjoyed as a side order to the maincourse of the book

I Am Much Too Alone in This World, Yet Not Alone

I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone
enough
to truly consecrate the hour.
I am much too small in this world, yet not small
enough
to be to you just object and thing,
dark and smart.
I want my free will and want it accompanying
the path which leads to action;
and want during times that beg questions,
where something is up,
to be among those in the know,
or else be alone.

I want to mirror your image to its fullest perfection,
never be blind or too old
to uphold your weighty wavering reflection.
I want to unfold.
Nowhere I wish to stay crooked, bent;
for there I would be dishonest, untrue.
I want my conscience to be
true before you;
want to describe myself like a picture I observed
for a long time, one close up,
like a new word I learned and embraced,
like the everday jug,
like my mother's face,
like a ship that carried me along
through the deadliest storm.

by Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Annemarie S. Kidder