In the afterword to his translation of Jakob Wassermann's My First Wife, a scrupulous account of his divorce from his wife of 20 years, Michael Hofmann quotes Rilke: "In the depths, everything becomes law." The divorce of man and woman is one such depth, an anti-tale of many inversions: Love becomes hate, unanimity becomes animosity, shared interests become competing claims, alliance becomes war; and everything that seemed fleshly and human and natural, everything for which it might appear impossible to legislate—trust, generosity, self-sacrifice, nurture, belief itself—everything does indeed become law.
