“An island is a very human idea; it reflects a very human feeling of disconnectedness. But nature is not a mirror. Underneath what we can see, all bodies of land are connected as parts of a whole. If you were to ask an island if it felt isolated or adrift, it would find the question silly. It would find the whole concept absurd. To an island there’d be no such thing as an island. Feeling disconnected comes easy to humans, I think. Our brains are wired to define ourselves through what we’re not: to recognize differences and imagine divides, to say I am this because I’m not that. I can’t reach that blob of land out there, so it must be isolated. It’s harder to wrap one’s head around the many ways in which we are parts of each other, parts of each other’s histories, parts of the social and natural systems we move through. Always affecting and being affected - always in that sense belonging not just to our families or groups or nations but in the world.”

Kappus did not know if he was truly a poet, but his correspondence with Rilke could make his lonely life feel like poetry. Receiving these letters, Kappus wrote, felt like being summoned into another world: “When I think that all these unsayable, marvelous, beautiful things you’ve entrusted to me are meant for me alone—that you find me worthy of sharing in these riches, meant only for the few, the solitary—I feel very proud.” There’s a magical kind of logic at work here, whereby receiving Rilke’s attention somehow also confers the glowing light of his art. To be included within the reaches of someone else’s fame was to reconsider the boundaries of the self: Kappus’s future might have been unknown, but he no longer was.