I have been travelling recently, and will be again soon. But home life in the last years for me has been about adapting to a large degree of solitude, so that when I come home again the life of the world quickly disappears and the solitude takes over in its immensity very quickly. I remember a line of Rilke’s in Letters to a Young Poet in which he asks the poet to imagine what it would be like to suddenly be taken out of one’s room in the world and placed upon a mountaintop; that he might then feel the most “annihilating sense of abandonment.” He says that it is a similar experience to one who realizes his solitude. My little doggie is dying in his bed right now, not much longer for the world, and I am going outside to sleep in my cocoon under the stars and to listen to the forest. The gravity and enormity of this solitude engulfs us, its reality at this point larger than the populated world that we also inhabit. We are at home in it.