My Brother

My brother's getting married! His sense of humor is amazing, and stunningly creative. We're forever stealing each others' jokes; I borrow more than I loan. His creative abilities are raw, but brilliant; he would protest it, but I believe he could be every bit the writer and poet I am if he so chose. However, he chose a different way of living: computer science. I programmed a bit in high school, but I never had a good handle on the more mathematical side of reason necessary for devoting myself to the study of computers. I chose language and poetry because I feel I must, the only valid reason in Rilke's eyes to write. Rilke also knew that the "half-artistic professions," as he called them, to be further from art than the honest appplication of reason to reality:

"Art too is just a way of living, and however one lives, one can, without knowing, prepare for it; in everything real one is closer to it, more its neighbor, than in the unreal half-artistic professions, which, while they pretend to be close to art, in practice deny and attack the existence of all art - as, for example, all of journalism does and almost all criticism and three quarters of what is called (and wants to be called) literature. I am glad, in a word, that you have overcome the danger of landing in one of those professions, and are solitary and courageous, somewhere in a rugged reality. May the coming year support and strengthen you in that."
-Ranier Maria Rilke

My brother and his future wife have a great future ahead of them. Both are very real in Rilke's sense of the word, and I think they are great together. I wish them only the best in life. His words and programs are very good, from what little I've seen, but I believe his greatest accomplishments will be intellectual fulfillment, and the kind of satisfaction that only home and hearth can bring.

Way to go, bro.