Poet Lisel Mueller on Meaning in Ephemeral Lives

7 hours ago7 min read

The poet Lisel Mueller once offered a line that feels less like a crafted verse and more like a quiet truth overheard in a moment of clarity: 'What exists, exists so that it can be lost and become precious. ' It’s a sentiment that resonates deeply when you sit with people and listen to their stories, as I often do.Mueller, who passed away in 2020, understood the weight of ephemeral things—the fleeting glance, the childhood home, the memory of a loved one’s laugh. Her own life was shaped by loss, having fled Nazi Germany as a teenager, an experience that undoubtedly honed her sense of how fragility imbues our world with meaning.This isn’t just a poetic device; it’s a psychological reality. We see it in the way we cling to faded photographs or in the sudden value we assign to a mundane routine once it’s gone.In conversations with folks from all walks of life, a common thread emerges: we don’t truly calibrate the worth of a moment until it exists firmly in the rearview. Mueller’s work, which earned her a Pulitzer Prize, gently insists that impermanence isn’t a flaw in the design of life but its very core mechanic.Her observation challenges our relentless pursuit of permanence, suggesting instead that the beauty and depth of our experiences are irrevocably tied to their finite nature. It’s a human-centric philosophy, one that finds its proof not in grand arguments, but in the quiet, reflective stories we tell each other about what we’ve loved and what we’ve let go.

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