Destiny Poem by gershon hepner

The sum of all misunderstandings round a name
will usually provide, said Rilke, a foundation for their fame,
but those who’re understood, I think, face a far greater fear
that they may jeopardize their destiny while saving their career.

Lee Siegel quotes Rilke in an article on critic and memoirist Lee Siegel in The New York Times Book Review, June 18,2006 (“Paul Zweig’s Journeys Into the Self”) :
RILKE once said that fame is the sum of misunderstandings that accrue around a name. Though the poet, critic and memoirist Paul Zweig was admired in literary circles during his lifetime, he slipped through fame's embrace. That may have been his misfortune, but you can read the books of this 'fierce little man' — as his friend, the poet Robert Bly, called Zweig at a tribute held last month at Poets House in Manhattan — unclouded by commentary and judgment, fresh, as if they had just appeared. And Zweig, who died of lymphatic cancer in 1984 at the age of 49, is well worth revisiting. At a time when writers often write with calculated eccentricity rather than out of a fateful obsession, and compose memoirs that seem devoid of self-understanding, his raw, original studies of culture and his masterly autobiographies provide a rich diet for famished readers. Zweig may have spent much of his life in the academy, but he wished to throw himself into the world and test his ideas against experience, and then measure himself against the results. He wanted a destiny, not a career.


6/18/06