snow is wonderful but not when it prompts the idiots on american family radio to say things like "global warming?! STEP OUTSIDE" like hey totally weird fluctuations in weather have zero to do with us roasting the earth. anywho. there's been naught to do for the past few days as my work has been closed and snow keeps us confined to the house/kroger. so i've been catching up on project runway and reading. my library card is the best thing that's ever happened to me, so far i've watched documentaries about spelling bees, teenage alcohol abuse, growing up online, etc, and started reading the bilingual version of duino elegies by rainer maria rilke. who is the shit. and not only am i enlightened with every word he writes, but i'm (allegedly) practicing my german at the same time! JA JA! the reason i actually decided to borrow that book was because the night before dan and i watched 'another woman,' a less popular woody allen movie with gena rowlands and mia farrow. rowlands' character is a scholar of german poetry and philosophy and her mention of rilke prompted me to start reading him. that and the fact that he's considered one of the best german poets of all time and i should probably know a thing or two about him if i profess to speak (poorly) the language.
so here are a few lines from the first elegy that i haven't stopped thinking about since i read them:
Isn't it time that these most ancient sorrows
grew fruitful? Time that we tenderly loosed ourselves
from the loved one, and, unsteadily, survived:
the way the arrow, suddenly all vector, survives the string
to be more than itself. For abiding is nowhere.
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