As the intense young daughter of a very fluent lawyer (with whom I couldn’t win an argument no matter how I tried), I quickly learned that writing was the way to get my point across without a fight. I’d write down my thoughts at night on a legal-sized yellow pad (lawyers seem to have an endless supply of legal-sized yellow pads), fold the paper carefully, and shove it under my father’s bedroom door after he’d gone to bed. In the morning he’d come down to breakfast with my note in hand, lay it out on the table, and proceed to address my thinking—agreeing with some points and highlighting not only any intellectual flaws in my ideas but how I might better have expressed them. This is how I learned to write. Later I graduated to journal writing and over the ensuing years took up poetry, short stories, novels, and scholarly papers. Like many writers, I was and am also a voracious reader and have read everything I could get my hands on. However, I chose Ranier Maria Rilke as my chief