Hi Rilke,

I heard you have a problem separating yourself from other people. I know what you mean. Sometimes I feel like my cells could be reshuffled into a tree, or a piece of vinyl metro seating, or the angry-looking woman on the bench outside MGC at any minute. I can’t always tell what separates me from someone, or something, else. It’s a dangerous way to live.

I’ve run into you several times in my life. When I was eight years old, I would lay in bed and try to will the little animal erasers off my bookshelf using only my mind, and once, I’m pretty sure, I felt my whole body rise up against the sheets in a split-second levitation. My mom must have known I was staying up all night, because she came up once and gave me a notecard with a quote on the back of it. She called it a “dream card,” and said it would help me sleep.

That didn’t work, but I did like reading it at night, and kept trying to pronounce your name. It said, “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue.” To me, you were a philosopher who lived in northern California, and I decided you had cranberry-red bead curtains, which I always wanted. We would have been great friends.

When I was twelve, I got a bulletin board, and I pinned the dream card to the cork. It hung out there for a while — one day when I was fifteen I came home from a Halloween party and realized the card was gone. By then, I knew who you were, and that I could just Google the quote if I ever needed to find it again, so I never replaced it.

To be honest, Rilke, I love your letters and your advice on writing. But my more pressing question has to do with empathy: how do you balance the understanding needed to write with the selfishness needed to survive? How do you deal with the force of all of this laughter and yelling long enough to get to the point in the night when you can sit down and write and not worry about saving the world? I’m easily distracted. I meet someone with a mysterious illness and start googling med school requirements.

Last week, I asked a scientist friend what to do about this, and he handed me twenty-five pages of research on neuroscientific theories of empathy and human connection. That was pretty cool, but what was better was the quote on the seventeenth page, which was a version of what you had written on the dream card. It was longer, and said, “And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.” All sorts of people feel connected to you, Rilke, from scientists to goofy kids, and I wonder if that is because you always knew you were connected to them, even years and years into the future.

Really, I’m not sure why I asked you these questions. If I were better at following advice, I would just trust you and chill out and live my way straight into the answer. That’s always worked for me with writing. Why shouldn’t it work for all the other angles of life?

Thanks for the mystery,

Molly

Molly McGinnis is a junior studying literature and international relations at American University. You can follow her on Twitter for updates on science news, current events, and all things literary: https://twitter.com/mols_of_america