What makes us most distinctively human, our reason or our emotions? How do we know when relationships with others are authentic, and when they’re just a matter of utility? Does civilization corrupt or improve us? Is honesty all it’s cracked up to be, or is lying a social inevitability? Which is more important to our happiness, love or work?
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In his poem “You Who Never Arrived,” Rainer Maria Rilke suggests that we can mourn love as an unrealized possibility, and see this loss signified everywhere in the ordinary objects of the external world. In “Be Ahead of All Parting” (II.13 from his “Sonnets to Orpheus”), he seems to claim that poetry has the capacity to redeem such losses—and retrieve them, so to speak, from their underworld. Wes & Erin discuss these two classics, and whether—as Rilke suggests—death can be put in service of life, and suffering sourced as the principal wellspring of a joyful existence.
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