Startup Life: Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

One of the long quotes that we intended to include in Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur was this excerpt from Rainer Maria Rilke letters to a 19 year old cadet in the Vienna Military Academy written over a period from 1903 to 1908. Even though the words were written more than a century ago, they are still powerful and timely. This quote was located at the very end of Chapter Two: Philosophy –

It is also good to love: because love is
difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the
most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final
test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. That
is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of
love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their
forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they
must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and therefore
loving, for a long time ahead and far on into life, is: solitude, a heightened
and deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves. Loving does not at
first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what
would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still
incoherent?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become
something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake
of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that
chooses him and calls him to vast distances. Only in this sense, as the task of
working on themselves ("to hearken and to hammer day and night"), may
young people use the love that is given to them. Merging and surrendering and every
kind of communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time, save
and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human
lives are as yet barely large enough.

And this quote was the epigraph at the beginning of Chapter Five: Personality –

“Love consists in this, that
two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.” Rainer Maria Rilke

Enjoy!

Startup Life: Poem of the Day – The Summer Day by Mary Oliver

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

– Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, 1992,
Beacon Press, Boston, MA. Reprinted with permission.

Mary Oliver is one of my favorite poets. My funeral instructions include the reading of her poem White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field, along with the playing of some Bach or Samuel Barber. (Brad has specified Pink Floyd "Dark Side of the Moon" for his memorial soundtrack. We are different from each other.)

We had intended to include this poem at the beginning of Startup Life Chapter Six: Values because of the vital questions it asks. These would be excellent starting points for conversations with your life partner over a monthly Life Dinner. It also feels lovely to have summer images during a week of bitter cold here in Colorado.

Startup Life: Poetry and Permissions

One of the many interesting things I've learned during the publishing process of Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur with Brad is that publishing houses don't do the work of getting permission to reprint copyrighted material – authors are responsible for this work. Or at least our publisher doesn't do this work, and we were responsible. Neither Brad nor I realized this until about 3 weeks before our final galley proofs were due when we received an email on October 26th asking whether we had gotten reprint permission for the poems and literary quotes we had included in our drafts. Surprise. Oops.

Brad's terrific and resolute assistant, Kelly Collins, sprang into action at the beginning of November, only to discover that it takes 6-8 weeks for the permissions and our final author draft was due in 4 weeks.

I was really disappointed and unhappy with this realization since I had been the instigator of the poetry and thought it added a richness and depth to the text and supported our deep belief that words and language matter.

Surely that's what underpaid and overworked publishing interns are for?

We did receive and pay for permission to reprint a Mary Oliver poem "The Summer Day," in time, but it didn't make sense to include just one of the poems. So we pulled the poems by Mary Oliver and Wendell Berry, and quotes from Rainer Maria Rilke and Antoine St. Exupery, among others.

But Brad and I both still hold the conviction that beautiful language can connect us and give voice to emotion and thoughts that may be difficult for non-poets to express. So I am going to blog the quotes and poetry we had originally intended to include in Startup Life, as well as some additional gems that we love. Here's a poem by Wendell Berry that we intended to include in Chapter Two: Philosophy –

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in
me

and I wake in the night at the least
sound

in fear of what my life and my
children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood
drake

rests in his beauty on the water,
and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with
forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind
stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world,
and am free.

From The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry copyright 1998 by Wendell Berry
from Counterpoint Press, a member of Perseus Books, LLC

Poem: The Problem of Describing Trees

The aspen glitters in the wind.

And that delights us.

The leaf flutters, turning,

Because that motion in the heat of summer

Protects its cells from drying out. Likewise the leaf

Of the cottonwood.

The gene pool threw up a wobbly stem

And the tree danced. No.

The tree capitalized.

No. There are limits to saying,

In language, what the tree did.

It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us.

Dance with me, dancer. Oh, I will.

Aspens doing something in the wind.

— by Robert Hass from The New Yorker, June 27, 2005 (p. 97)