Insight

I've been netflixing this crazy British series called The Book Group. I love just listening to the accents while I work. I tried watching it with the girls but then we hit the whole series of F-words in that first episode, and I dived for the remote, while realizing that those Brits will put ANYTHING on their tvs! So it's not family-friendly, but it's a great, amusing background when I'm alone at home. Kind of a high class soap with books as the structure.

A character just read this out:


. . . Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)—they are experiences.

[From “The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge” in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell (Vintage International, 1989)]