Rilke on how to break up with integrity and preserve friendship after romance, Adrienne Rich on how reading emancipates, a "new" Maurice Sendak book

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[How to Break Up with Integrity: Rilke on Unwounding Separation and the Difficult Art of Recalibrating Broken Relationships]( [lettersonlife_rilke.jpg?fit=320%2C494]( We speak of love as a gift, but although it may come at first unbidden, as what Percy Shelley called a “speechless swoon of joy,” true intimacy between two people is a difficult achievement — a hard-earned glory with stakes so high that the prospect of collapse is absolutely devastating. When collapse does happen — when intimacy is severed by some disorienting swirl of chance and choice — the measure of a love is whether and to what extent the kernel of connection can be salvaged as the shell cracks, how willing each partner is to remain openhearted while brokenhearted, how much mutual care and kindness the two who have loved each other can extend in the almost superhuman endeavor of redeeming closeness after separation. How to do this with maximal integrity, in a way that embodies Adrienne Rich’s [definition of honorable human relationships]( is what the poet Rainer Maria Rilke (December 4, 1875–December 29, 1926) explores in one of his staggeringly insightful letters, included in the posthumous collection [Letters on Life]( ([public library]( edited and translated from German by Ulrich Baer. [rilke4.jpg?w=680] 1902 portrait of Rainer Maria Rilke by Helmuth Westhoff, Rilke’s brother-in-law The day after Christmas 1921, nearly two decades after he asserted that [“for one human being to love another… is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks… the work for which all other work is but preparation,”]( and four years after the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay modeled [the art of the kind, clean breakup]( Rilke writes in a letter to the German painter Reinhold Rudolf Junghanns — a close friend struggling through separation and aching with the loss of love: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]As soon as two people have resolved to give up their togetherness, the resulting pain with its heaviness or particularity is already so completely part of the life of each individual that the other has to sternly deny himself to become sentimental and feel pity. The beginning of the agreed-upon separation is marked precisely by this pain, and its first challenge will be that this pain already belongs separately to each of the two individuals. This pain is an essential condition of what the now solitary and most lonely individual will have to create in the future out of his reclaimed life. He considers the measure of a “good breakup” — a separation that, however painful in its immediate loss, is a long-term gain for both partners, individually and together: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]If two people managed not to get stuck in hatred during their honest struggles with each other, that is, in the edges of their passion that became ragged and sharp when it cooled and set, if they could stay fluid, active, flexible, and changeable in all of their interactions and relations, and, in a word, if a mutually human and friendly consideration remained available to them, then their decision to separate cannot easily conjure disaster and terror. [junghanns5.jpg?resize=680%2C426] Drawings by Reinhold Rudolf Junghanns Four weeks later, as Junghanns continues to struggle with letting go of his lover, Rilke admonishes against the painful elasticity of on-again/off-again relationships, in which the short-term alleviation of longing and loss comes at the price of ongoing mutual wounding: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]When it is a matter of a separation, pain should already belong in its entirety to that other life from which you wish to separate. Otherwise the two individuals will continually become soft toward each other, causing helpless and unproductive suffering. In the process of a firmly agreed-upon separation, however, the pain itself constitutes an important investment in the renewal and fresh start that is to be achieved on both sides. Rilke emphasizes the importance of an initial period of distance in order to properly recalibrate a romantic relationship into a real friendship — a period which requires a tremendous leap of faith toward an uncertain but possibly immensely rewarding new mode of connection: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]People in your situation might have to communicate as friends. But then these two separated lives should remain without any knowledge of the other for a period and exist as far apart and as detached from the other as possible. This is necessary for each life to base itself firmly on its new requirements and circumstances. Any subsequent contact (which may then be truly new and perhaps very happy) has to remain a matter of unpredictable design and direction. [junghanns.jpg?resize=680%2C367] Etching by Reinhold Rudolf Junghanns That autumn, Rilke counsels another brokenhearted friend — this time a woman — through a similar predicament. Noting that “our confusions have always been part of our riches,” he reiterates that whatever the pull toward reunion may be, it is crucial to take distance in order to gain a clearer perspective on saving what is worth saving of the relationship. In a mirror-image complement to his wisdom on [challenging necessity of giving space in love]( he insists on the difficult, necessary art of taking space after love: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]I have written “distance”; should there be anything like advice that I would be able to suggest to you, it would be the hunch that you need to search for that now, for distance. Distance: from the current consternation and from those new conditions and proliferations of your soul that you enjoyed back at the time of their occurrence but of which you have until now not at all truly taken possession. A short isolation and separation of a few weeks, a period of reflection, and a new focusing of your crowded and unbridled nature would offer the greatest probability of rescuing all of that which seems in the process of destroying itself in and through itself. Rilke cautions against the temptation to turn a willfully blind eye toward all the factors that have rendered the romantic relationship unfeasible and to reunite — a choice that, rather than healing, only retraumataizes and perpetuates the cycle of mutual disappointment: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Nothing locks people in error as much as the daily repetition of error — and how many individuals that ultimately became bound to each other in a frozen fate could have secured for themselves, by means of a few small, pure separations, that rhythm through which the mysterious mobility of their hearts would have inexhaustibly persisted in the deep proximity of their interior world-space, through every alteration and change. There is a symmetry, both sad and beautiful, between Rilke’s faith in the redemptive power of distance in saving love after a breakup and his insistence that [“the highest task of a bond between two people [is] that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other”]( — as within romance, so beyond romance. Complement this particular portion of the immeasurably wise and consolatory [Letters on Life]( with Epictetus on [love and loss]( and Adam Phillips on [why frustration is necessary for satisfaction in love]( then revisit Rilke on [what it really means to love]( [the combinatorial nature of inspiration]( [the lonely patience of creative work]( [what it takes to be an artist]( and [how hardship enlarges us](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook]( donating=loving Each week of the past eleven years, I have poured tremendous time, thought, love, and resources into Brain Pickings, which remains free and is made possible by patronage. If you found any joy and stimulation here this year, please consider supporting my labor of love with a donation. And if you already donate, from the bottom of my heart: THANK YOU. monthly donation You can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch.  one-time donation Or you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. [Start Now](  [Give Now]( [Presto & Zesto in Limboland: A Lovely and Unusual “New” Maurice Sendak Book Elegizing a Lost Friendship]( This article originally appeared in [The New York Times Book Review]( on September 25, 2018. [prestozesto.jpg?resize=320%2C231]( Bulgaria of my childhood was bereft of the classics of American children’s literature. Instead, I grew up with the unsugared Brothers Grimm and the strangeness of Lewis Carroll. I discovered [The Velveteen Rabbit]( and [The Giving Tree]( and [Charlotte’s Web]( only as a young adult, and found in them a shock of warmth and wisdom for my fledgling life as an immigrant. I still remember sitting on a Brooklyn rooftop and reading [Where the Wild Things Are]( for the first time, well into my twenties, aching with dislocation from the world and a roaring sense of lack of control. I remember feeling suddenly awash in reassurance that the inconsolable loneliness of living is survivable, that love can be steadfast and belonging possible even amid the world’s wildness. “I don’t write for children,” Maurice Sendak told Stephen Colbert in [his last on-camera appearance]( four months before his death in 2012. “I write — and somebody says, ‘That’s for children!’” From his largely forgotten 1956 debut as the author-illustrator of a picture book, [Kenny’s Window]( — a philosophically inclined parable of love, loneliness, and knowing what you really want — to his most beloved masterpieces, Where the Wild Things Are and [In the Night Kitchen]( to his final farewell to the world, the beautiful and sorrowful [My Brother’s Book]( Sendak has enchanted generations with singularly illustrated stories that delight children and emanate existential consolation for the trauma of living. [Presto & Zesto in Limboland]( ([public library]( Sendak’s posthumously published collaboration with the writer and director Arthur Yorinks, is not one of those books. At least not at first glance. Rather, it is the playful story of two friends’ adventures in a topsy-turvy world, part Alice in Wonderland, part Grimm fairy tale, part prescient analogue for the nonsensical cultural moment we inhabit. “One day Presto and Zesto, good friends, took a walk and ended up in Limboland,” we read. “They didn’t mean to go there, who would go there, but they had a lot on their minds.” [prestozesto1.jpg?resize=680%2C434]( In this uncanny world, two sugar beets are getting married, but their perfect wedding gift — a set of bagpipes, of course — is in the hands of the formidable Bumbo, a monster resembling a Wild Thing skinned of sweetness. As Presto and Zesto journey through Limboland to steal the bagpipes from Bumbo, they encounter visual strangenesses left unexplained — a rat holding a ruler, a goat’s rear sticking up from a pond — indulging the way children’s minds so naturally whisper This could be us at even the most bizarre and improbable vignettes. [prestozesto2.jpg?resize=680%2C434]( The story is not so much a story as a narrative filmstrip reeled around Sendak’s art — ten drawings he created in 1990 as projections for a London Symphony Orchestra performance of a 1927 opera setting Czech nursery rhymes to music. Sendak resurfaced the art once more for a charity concert in 1997, then tucked it away for good. But Yorinks — a friend of Sendak’s for more than four decades who had collaborated with him on two previous children’s books, [The Miami Giant]( and [Mommy]( — had fallen in love with the drawings and never forgot them. He brought them up over a work lunch with Sendak and suggested that they might be a book — a book in need of a story. That afternoon, the two friends arranged the pictures on Sendak’s drawing table and, in a state of creative flow punctuated by wild bursts of laughter, began improvising the story. They refined the manuscript over the coming months and declared it a picture book. But then, as it happens in life, life happened. Presto & Zesto vanished in the shadow of other projects. [prestozesto3.jpg?resize=680%2C468]( One day long after his friend’s death, Yorinks received a note from Sendak’s longtime assistant and now literary executor, Lynn Caponera, alerting him that she had discovered among the author’s papers a strange manuscript titled Presto & Zesto in Limboland. I imagine how difficult it must have been for Yorinks to revisit this story of two friends, named after the nicknames he and Sendak had for each other; how difficult and beautiful to see it morph into a private elegy — in the classic dual sense of lamentation and celebration — for a lost friendship. And so, six years after Sendak’s death, this unusual picture book is finally being born. It is both like and unlike classic Sendak. At times, there are leaps in the narrative that strain the effort to stitch the drawings into a cohesive story. As a young man, when asked to illustrate a book of Tolstoy’s short stories, Sendak had confided in his editor — the visionary [Ursula Nordstrom]( — that he admired the [“cohesion and purpose”]( of Tolstoy’s narrative but feared that his art would fail to match it. Nordstrom, ever the nurturer of unpolished genius, assured him otherwise. He [did illustrate Tolstoy](. This formative storytelling ideal of “cohesion and purpose” became an animating force of his work. Perhaps Sendak put Presto & Zesto in a drawer because he was unsure the book had achieved this. [prestozesto4.jpg?resize=680%2C454]( But I am glad it lives. In a story propelled by surprise after surprise in deliberate defiance of the expectations of ordinary reality, where logical discontinuity is a vehicle of joy, these leaps furnish rather than obstruct the whimsical world-building. The dialogue between image and story becomes essentially an act of translation, calling to mind the Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska’s lovely notion of [“that rare miracle when a translation stops being a translation and becomes… a second original.”]( [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook]( [An Antidote to White Male Capitalist Culture: Adrienne Rich on the Liberating Power of Storytelling and How Reading Emancipates]( [rich_lies.jpg?w=680]( are key to understanding the world and participating in a democratic society,” Carl Sagan insisted at the end of his life in arguing for [reading as the path to democracy](. “Someone reading a book is a sign of order in the world,” [wrote]( the poet Mary Ruefle a generation later. Long before Sagan and Ruefle, Adrienne Rich (May 16, 1929–March 27, 2012) examined the emancipatory power of reading in her preface to [On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978]( ([public library]( — the indispensable collection of essays and speeches that gave us Rich on [honorable human relationships]( and [what “truth” really means](. [adriennerich.jpg?resize=680%2C725] Portrait of Adrienne Rich from the walls of the [Academy of American Poets]( Writing in 1978, Rich considers the gendered power dynamics of the written word: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]The decline in adult literacy means not merely a decline in the capacity to read and write, but a decline in the impulse to puzzle out, brood upon, look up in the dictionary, mutter over, argue about, turn inside-out in verbal euphoria, the “incomparable medium” of language — Tillie Olsen’s term. And this decline comes, ironically, at a moment in history when women, the majority of the world’s people, have become most aware of our need for real literacy, for our own history, most searchingly aware of the lies and distortions of the culture men have devised, when we are finally prepared to take on the most complex, subtle, and drastic revaluation ever attempted of the condition of the species. Contemplating what the television screen has displaced — a displacement of critical thinking only exacerbated by the computer and smartphone screens in the decades since — Rich presages [the problem of wisdom in the age of information]( and writes: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]People grow up who not only don’t know how to read, a late-acquired skill among the world’s majority; they don’t know how to talk, to tell stories, to sing, to listen and remember, to argue, to pierce an opponent’s argument, to use metaphor and imagery and inspired exaggeration in speech; people are growing up in the slack flicker of a pale light which lacks the concentrated bum of a candle flame or oil wick or the bulb of a gooseneck desk lamp: a pale, wavering, oblong shimmer, emitting incessant noise, which is to real knowledge or discourse what the manic or weepy protestations of a drunk are to responsible speech. Drunks do have a way of holding an audience, though, and so does the shimmery ill-focused oblong screen. Rich condemns this unthinking mesmerism as “a culture of manipulated passivity” and casts it as a primary tool of upholding society’s age-old power structures, particularly patriarchal power. (Several years earlier, James {NAME} had reflected on [how reading helped him break out of society’s racial power structure]( She contrasts this “manipulated passivity” with how women regard the world, pointing to reading and storytelling as vital tools of empowerment and emancipation: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Women’s culture, on the other hand, is active: women have been the truly active people in all cultures, without whom human society would long ago have perished, though our activity has most often been on behalf of men and children. Today women are talking to each other, recovering an oral culture, telling our life-stories, reading aloud to one another the books that have moved and healed us, analyzing the language that has lied about us, reading our own words aloud to each other. But to name and found a culture of our own means a real break from the passivity of the twentieth-century Western mind. [thebookofmemorygaps_ceciliaruiz3.jpg?w=680] Illustration from [The Book of Memory Gaps]( by Cecilia Ruiz Arguing that “to conjure with the passive culture and adapt to its rules is to degrade and deny the fullness of our meaning and intention,” she considers what an alternative culture might look like: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]To question everything. To remember what it has been forbidden even to mention. To come together telling our stories, to look afresh at, and then to describe for ourselves, the frescoes of the Ice Age, the nudes of “high art,” the Minoan seals and figurines, the moon-landscape embossed with the booted print of a male foot, the microscopic virus, the scarred and tortured body of the planet Earth. To do this kind of work takes a capacity for constant active presence, a naturalist’s attention to minute phenomena, for reading between the lines, watching closely for symbolic arrangements, decoding difficult and complex messages left for us by women of the past. It is work, in short, that is opposed by, and stands in opposition to, the entire twentieth-century white male capitalist culture. [On Lies, Secrets, and Silence]( remains an indispensable read. Complement this particular portion with Gwendolyn Brooks on [the power of books]( Rebecca Solnit on [why we read and write]( Anaïs Nin on [how books awaken us from the slumber of almost-living]( and Mary Oliver on [how reading saved her life]( then revisit Rich on [the political power of poetry]( [how silence fertilizes the imagination]( and her [stunning tribute to women in astronomy](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook]( donating=loving Each week of the past eleven years, I have poured tremendous time, thought, love, and resources into Brain Pickings, which remains free and is made possible by patronage. If you found any joy and stimulation here this year, please consider supporting my labor of love with a donation. And if you already donate, from the bottom of my heart: THANK YOU. monthly donation You can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch.  one-time donation Or you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. [Start Now](  [Give Now]( [---] You're receiving this email because you subscribed on Brain Pickings. This weekly newsletter comes out on Sundays and offers the week's most unmissable articles. Brain Pickings PLEASE DO NOT USE AS A MAILING ADDRESS 47 Bergen Street, 3rd floorBrooklyn, NY 11201 [Add us to your address book](//brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/vcard?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=179ffa2629) [unsubscribe from this list](   [update subscription preferences](