Half Broken Things

For Iain Burnside

’But this is what… people are so often and so disastrously wrong in doing: they (who by their very nature are impatient) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment…

‘And what can happen then? What can life do with this heap of half broken things that they would like to call their happiness, and their future?

‘And so each of them loses himself for the sake of the other person, and loses the other. And loses the vast possibilities… in exchange for an unfruitful confusion, out of which nothing more can come; nothing but a bit of disgust, disappointment and poverty.’

From LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell, copyright © 1984 Stephen Mitchell. Used by permission of Random House, Inc.