days without a job

I first learned about Rilke through my ears.

My mother would read - mainly to my father - the short book Lay of the Love and Death of Cornet Christoph Rilke. She would read it in its original language, in her Viennese German accent. Slowly, with feeling and time and expression, and aloud, as it is meant to be read.  Although I understood the German she was reading, I did not fully understand the profoundness of his writing; nor did I foresee the immense impact that Rilke, especially in the form of his Terrifying Angels, would come to have in my life.