So, your life. There it is before you – possibly a road, a ribbon, a dotted line, a map – let’s say you’re 25, then you make some decisions, do things, have setbacks, have triumphs, become someone, a bus driver, a professor of Indo-European linguistics, a pirate, a cosmetologist, years pass, maybe in a family maybe not, maybe happy maybe not, then one day you wake up and you’re seventy.

These two sentences which open Anne Carson’s recent essay in the LRB, Gloves on! (August 15 2024), stopped me in my tracks. The rest of the piece is likewise beautifully touching: Carson goes on to detail the deteriorating impact Parkinson’s has had on her handwriting, how she feels much less herself when she sees her handwrit word. I am someone who has graduated to face a crossroad where a four-way intersection (if not in practice, at least in the abstract) between becoming a bus driver, a philologist, a pirate, and a cosmetologist seems both totally plausible and deeply terrifying. Let’s say I turn twenty-five. Will I already be looking back at a trail of bad decisions? Where do I strike the balance between fulfillment and practicality? Why has the march of time turned into something very sour? The answers to these questions can only come internally, and at any age beyond my current twenty-two, this much I (think I) know. But that doesn’t stop me from turning to past anxieties to serve as my blueprint when my own anxieties guide me nowhere.

***

Ist es nicht Zeit, daß wir liebend
uns vom Geliebten befrein und es bebend bestehn:
wie der Pfeil die Sehne besteht, um gesammelt im Absprung
mehr zu sein als er selbst. Denn Bleiben ist nirgends.

(Rainer Maria Rilke, Elegy I, 49-53)

Denn Bleiben ist nirgends. For remaining is nowhere.. In these lines, intended for the isolated lover Rilke addresses in his first Duino Elegy, transcendence to an outer realm is to be understood as the ultimate liberation, becoming more than the singular self. The second stanza’s arrow (der Pfeil) that survives the string embodies a strength bordering on the insane in its ‘Absprung.’ The hero lives on in essence; even his downfall contributes to a spiritual future in distinguishing his personhood, as Kathleen Komar (2010) comments. We come somewhat close to the image of kleos the physically hapless Hektor has in mind in Iliad 22, anchored in the mouths and words of men to come. Transcendence is the single greatest thing man can secure for himself, Rilke insists, yet the self-conscious human, riddled with an anxiety that only increases with time, cannot bring himself to make that leap. But in our real world, stagnancy is equally crippling and socially frowned upon. To stay put is a sign of professional failure, at least in young adulthood. Think of how many people my age view graduating into their childhood bedroom, without the means to make it to an overpriced London flatshare, with utter chagrin. Five years without a promotion? Embarrassing. Being between ‘Strom und Gestein’ (Elegy II, 76), which in Rilke’s poetic world evokes the balance between the flowing, pure consciousness of the Angels, and physical stasis of an inanimate world of Things, represents to an anxious ‘Quarterlifer’ like myself the unbreachable gulf separating what I want, from what I need. Will there ever be alignment between what I desire for myself, and what the world seems to be demanding from me? How ever could I begin to broach that gap? Rilke might have something to placate me in his Letters to a Young Poet, borne out of six years of correspondence with the young cadet Kappus, but let us seek out some more modern guidance first.

***

What’s the deal with ‘Quarterlife’? People capitalise anything these days!

(Author to her cousin, Primrose Hill Bookshop, July 2024)

I think about myself and my place in the world a lot, arguably too much. Last summer, when everyone was pouring into cinemas to watch the new hot-ticket Barbie, in a pick-me attempt to preserve film kudos, I shied away from the Robbie-Gosling extravaganza to slink into an emptier screening of Frances Ha, an earlier Gerwig piece. I came out of the film in tears, drama-queen that I am, faced with the prospect that my late twenties, and then the rest of my life, would be a running carousel of disappointment with only small glimmers of joy. People move, people change, people drift, money divides us, relationships trump friendships, parents age, time slips from under our fingers, but grows ever more burdensome on our hearts. In Frances Ha, to top things off, all this happens in black and white. I managed to calm myself then, but I’ve always had a nagging feeling that after a certain point, life ceases to be an enjoyable exercise in existence, and that that point is edging ever closer to me. It comes as no surprise then, that Satya Doyle Byock’s Quarterlife caught my eye. Noticing my interest, my cousin offered to buy it for me, as a graduation present. We had both experienced our fair share of pressure, familial and otherwise, over the last year or so, me at university, and him in his career, and there was a funny sense that even with a decade between us, he needed the book just as much as I did. It was comforting almost. The QLC (Quarterlife Crisis) truly has range. I enjoyed Quarterlife for the examples it offered, hedging psychotherapist Doyle Byock’s advice in the imaginary conversations she has with her fictionalised exemplars of different Quarterlifers, all amalgamations, I assume, of real clients she has helped. Four is a good, simple number, to which the good, simple dichotomy of Stability and Meaning can be applied.

These are the two ‘types’ of Quarterlifer, though people’s routes are rarely that simple: take Mira, the accomplished lawyer, happily partnered and by all typical accounts, successful, who burns out, and wishes she had pursued her ‘true’ passion for art, though the unstructured life she attempts to that end is also not without its challenges; or Grace, escaping an abusive homelife and hometown, who discovers liberation in her acceptance of her queerness, emotional solace in her girlfriend, and a newfound joy in her self-made life, but is unable to perform any tasks of ‘adulting,’ and relies heavily on said girlfriend to do life for her. Even if we yearn for stability above all, or view ‘meaning’ as a guiding principle to life choices, there is always something lacking on the other end of the spectrum. Dyole Byock’s ‘people’ are incredibly well constructed, and I found parts of all their narratives compelling, if not entirely relatable. But as with many books which veer toward self-help, though I will say that Quarterlife is more developed than that designation implies, my problem is that I cannot apply the scenarios or the suggested actionable items (separate, build, listen, and integrate) to my life. I get the sense I would need Doyle Byock to sit down with me in person to come anywhere close to navigating my own Quarterlife crises. A haunting mix of Mira’s need for financial and academic validation, Connor’s subconscious sense of intense people pleasing, Grace’s codependent tendencies and queerness, and Danny’s creative but spiraling spirit, perhaps, but I could not possibly construct an actualisation of my ideal life by combining their narrative endings. For all my introspection, I cannot really map their paths onto mine. All the book has shown me is that I’m not alone, that this is hardly a unique sense of despair, and maybe for now, that is enough.

***

(veritas est) adaequatio rei et intellectus

(Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica)

You are so young, all still lies ahead of you, and I should like to ask you, as best I can, dear Sir, to be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign tongue.

(Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, trans. Charlie Louth; at present in Worpswede near Bremen, 16 July 1903)

But wishing life is not enough; we also need to live life to the fullest, even if we don’t believe in the modes and fashions of life that are suggested to us by the spirit of the age.

(Ramin Jahanbegloo, Letters to a Young Philosopher, ‘Seven: On the Art of Dying’)

(veritas est) adaequatio rei et intellectus. The understanding of the knower must be adequate to the thing to be known. Or must it? Whether the common medieval maxim, or the specific quotation from Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, the general idea of the adaequatio principle is that “nothing can be known without there being an appropriate ‘instrument’ in the makeup of the knower,” as E. F. Schumacher (1977) puts it, using the example of Beethoven’s musical talents: the gulf between my musical ability and Beethoven’s lies not in the instrument of the ear, both of which can hear just fine, but in his mind over mine in appreciating a piece of music. My mind would be inadequate in capturing a symphony, and so my intellectual powers fall short of the thing known, of music. If we extend this argument, that something (currently) inaccessible does not necessarily have no existence at all, the logic behind the sufferings of a Quarterlifer is that we assume an enjoyable (both stable and meaningful) life is not possible, because we lack the mental adaequatio to actualise it.  That’s fine in theory, but as Doyle Byock’s diverse yet troubled cohort shows us, inadaequatio plagues all but the best of us in Quarterlife. It seems that we can only hope that, instead of increasing our anxieties, as Rilke’s Elegies suggest, time will sharpen our adequacy for the ‘integration’ of ambition, desire, and practice. One wonders then, what the Quarterlifer is to do in the interim, when “all still lies ahead of [us].”

Instead of ruthlessly searching for the secrets of building a perfect life, I understand I may have to simply allow life to wash over me, to “live everything, [and thus] live the questions for now.”

Uncertain about pursuing a strict military career, nineteen-year-old Franz Kappus first wrote to Rilke in 1902, seeking guidance on the quality of his poetry. What he would receive, over the course of their correspondence, was a much fuller order: a treatise on life. Rilke masterfully eschews specifics – he will not make precise comments on Kappus’ poems, for example – for something far more profound. It is a profundity that made me cringe when I first read the Letters at age sixteen, because it felt too emotional, too fixated on inner states and being. Back then I just wanted to know that there would be a structure I could stick to for ‘success’ (however I defined that as a teenager), and Rilke refused to provide such structure in this correspondence. Six years later, the overriding quality it impresses on me is patience. Instead of ruthlessly searching for the secrets of building a perfect life, I understand I may have to simply allow life to wash over me, to “live everything, [and thus] live the questions for now.” The Worpswede letter encourages me to view my inevitable ‘incorrect’ future choices (what I do for work, who I date, where I live) as opportunities to see what my soul makes of any one of these decisions, to “see whether [my] inmost life feels confined by the form of this occupation.” Passivity seems to be the key here, understood as the application of an uncalculated childlike approach. This naivety does not absolve adulthood of its difficulty, but instead eases one into a less painful version of it. After all, “almost everything serious is difficult, and everything is serious.” If we cannot escape a world of difficulty, we can at least minimise a world of distress.

Indebted to Rilke’s Letters, their intellectual honesty, simple poetic writing, abstract musing, the Iranian-Canadian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo offers his own version, Letters to a Young Philosopher, addressed to an unnamed (fictitious?) student. My favourite chapter is ‘On Mediocrity,’ which examines the cultural loss of excellence in the face of human greed, but lately Jahanbegloo’s writing on age has come to hold increasing interest for me. In his seventh letter, he considers “existential dizziness” as a typical sign of youth, at a time when one has “yet to come to terms with oneself.” With so many possibilities swirling around, the likelihood of momentarily losing one’s way is high, but at heart the young are passionate about existence, whether well-meant or misdirected. In old age, one may forgo reliance on an ontological compass, if the self-consciousness built through the years has rendered the late-stage adult brimming with stability but lacking in desire., Remarking on a certain path older adults often end up taking, Jahanbegloo asks “what is the use (…) if an old person’s spirit is possessed by a sense of conservatism and conformism?” This may sound like the wisdom only an older person could have, and that a younger person would scoff at and ignore (precisely because it is): Jahanbegloo’s advice to the younger student encourages living life by his own terms, not worrying about what other people think.

I used to be wary of taking any kind of life advice from successful literati or academics. Although I fancied myself to be en route to a similarly lofty profession,  I felt I actually needed the cold, hard truths that I might not get from them. No point then, I thought,  in turning to the likes of Rilke for my navigation. But there it was, a sentence both beautiful and genuinely instructive: “Let life reveal itself to you.” This implies a certain acquiescence, not in terms of procrastination or laziness, but in the sense of the genuine pursuit of one’s interests (however short or long lived) to see where any development might lead. It’s not practical, it’s not economical, it’s hardly distinct, but it’s a jussive statement which means more to me at this stage in my life than a CV writing workshop ever could (granted, I’ve now attended my fair share). I don’t need to know what I’m doing, really, I just need to know that there are things I like now, things I liked back then, and likeable things that will reveal themselves to me as vital and attainable pieces of my future. If that’s a QLC, I’ll take it.

***

Art too is only a way of living, and it is possible, however one lives, to prepare oneself for it without knowing.

(Letters to a Young Poet, trans. Charlie Louth; On the second day of Christmas, 1908)

Being exposed to the meaning of life is to be gripped by the idea and the passion that life and thought are one. It means simply that one places one’s thought at the very corner of one’s life and at the same time takes the theme of human life as the main axis of the process of thinking. This process of thinking has always been in relation with the simple fact of being born in a world where life has no other goal than living among others.

(Letters to a Young Philosopher, ‘Ten: On Mediocrity’)

***

Sources Cited:

Carson, Anne “Gloves on!” in London Review of Books, August 15, 2024

Doyle Byock, Satya (2022) Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood, Penguin

Jahanbegloo, Ramin (2017) Letters to a Young Philosopher, Oxford University Press

Komar, Kathleen L. (2010) The Duino Elegies, in The Cambridge Companion to Rilke (ed. K. Leeder and R. Vilain)

Rainer Maria Rilke: Selected Poems with Parallel Text, trans. S. Ranson, ed. R. Vilain, (2011) Oxford World’s Classics

Rilke, Rainer Maria, Letters to a Young Poet, trans. Charlie Louth (2016) Penguin Little Black Classics

Schumacher, E. F. (1977) A Guide for the Perplexed, Harper & Row: New York (cited in M. Popova (2014) ‘How We Know What We Know: The Art of Seeing with the Eye of the Heart’, in The Marginalian)

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Kiana Rezakhanlou is a Classics graduate student at Cambridge, specialising in Hellenistic literature, philosophy, and literary criticism. Currently the Editor-in-Chief of The Camera, she has edited The Isis, The ORB, and The Alexandria Journal, and written for NYU’s Goethe Project, The Ashmolean’s Krasis Scheme, and The St. John’s Digitization Project. Her lesser words (tweets) can be found @pseudoetymology and on IG at @kiana.rza.