Lost Son is a novel by M. Allen Cunningham, published in May 2007 by Unbridled Books. It is about Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), the famous poet of the Duino Elegies and author of the internationally beloved Letters to a Young Poet.
Lost Son spans Western Europe from 1875 to 1917, depicting Rilke's life from birth to age 42. The poet is shown as child, lover, husband, father, protégé, misfit soldier, and lifelong wanderer. The novel explores Rilke's relationships with his parents, his wife Clara Westhoff and their daughter Ruth, the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, the French sculptor Auguste Rodin, and Lou Andreas-Salomé.
Famous quotes containing the words lost and/or son:
“Nihilism as a symptom that the losers have no more consolation: that they destroy in order to be destroyed, that without morality they no longer have any reason to “resign themselves”Mthat they put themselves on the level of the opposite principle and for their part also want power in that they compel the mighty to be their hangmen. This is the European form of Buddhism, renunciation, once all existence has lost its “meaning.””
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“I cannot beat off
Invincible modes of the sea, hearing:
Be a man my son by God.
He turned again
To the purring jet yellowing the murder story,
Deaf to the pathos circling in the air.”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)