Six Days Out
Those who know me well, have no need to ask me which of the candidates for president that I favor. I’ve
voted already,–the deed is done. Nothing more is left for me to do but wait.
The reason for my choice is singular, simple. Here is a paragraph from Letter no. 7 from Rainer Maria Rilke to a young poet. You will understand something of my reasoning by reading these lines. I’ll embolden the text that seemed especially important to me.
The girl and the woman, in their new, individual unfolding, will only in passing be imitators of male behavior and misbehavior and repeaters of male professions. After the uncertainty of such transitions, it will become obvious that women were going through the abundance and variation of those (often ridiculous) disguises just so that they could purify their own essential nature and wash out the deforming influences of the other sex. Women, in whom life lingers and dwells more immediately , more fruitfully, and more confidently, must surely have become riper and more human in their depths than light, easygoing man, who is not pulled down beneath the surface of life by the weight of any bodily fruit and who, arrogant and hasty, undervalues what he thinks he loves. This humanity of woman, carried in her womb through all her suffering and humiliation, will come to light when she has stripped off the conventions of mere femaleness in the transformations of her outward status, and those men who do not yet feel it approaching will be astonished by it. Someday (and even now, especially in the countries of northern Europe, trustworthy signs are already speaking and shining), someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only of life and reality: the female human being.
My choice simply had to do with the gestational process of giving birth to and raising a child. I cannot conceive of better preparation for caring for our country.
