The passages I copied down from books that summer—I still have the notebooks—largely revolve around and concern themselves with love and longing. I can see the jagged excitement of my handwriting where I transcribed these lines from Rilke:
For one to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been given to us, the ultimate, the final product and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation . . . Love does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person . . . Rather, it is high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for another’s sake.
Those words resonated as some kind of promise inside me as I churned through that black water, as I stalked through the dark woods with the wind roaring in the night branches, far overhead, as I climbed the trees and rode out the storms that came across the water, as I stood on the edge of the bluff and looked over the thick treetops shifting and swirling in the wind like another, greener lake.
(Was I “becoming world” in those days? What would that even mean?)