I have spent a good deal of the last days drunk and reading Rilke and trying to get close to people. The mixed messages of his solitude, that silence is so full of love that could not exist without someone to be so very far away from.

Between the stars, such distances: and yet, how much vaster

are the distances we learn of here.

Take a child perhaps... and next to him, another--,

O how ineffably far.

Could it be that Fate measures us in spans of being,

and hence seems to us so alien?

Think how many such spans stretch from a woman

to the man she longs for and avoids.

All is distance--, and nowhere does the circle close.

See the plate on the gaily laid table:

those fish, their strange expressions.

Fish are mute..., one used to think. Who knows?

But is there not finally a place where what fish language

would be is spoken without them?

- Sonnets to Orpheus, Sonnet 2:20, trans. Edward Snow

I am waiting and I am trying to be ready.