Items related to The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke
“You have to live life to the limit, not according to each day but by plumbing its depth.”
–RAINER MARIA RILKE
In this treasury of uncommon wisdom and spiritual insight, the best writings and personal philosophies of one of the twentieth century’s greatest poets, Rainer Maria Rilke, are gleaned by Ulrich Baer from thousands of pages of never-before translated correspondence.
The result is a profound vision of how the human drive to create and understand can guide us in every facet of life. Arranged by theme–from everyday existence with others to the exhilarations of love and the experience of loss, from dealing with adversity to the nature of inspiration, here are Rilke’s thoughts on how to live life in a meaningful way:
Life and Living: “How good life is. How fair, how incorruptible, how impossible to deceive: not even by strength, not even by willpower, and not even by courage. How everything remains what it is and has only this choice: to come true, or to exaggerate and push too far.”
Art: “The work of art is adjustment, balance, reassurance. It can be neither gloomy nor full of rosy hopes, for its essence consists of justice.”
Faith: “I personally feel a greater affinity to all those religions in which the middleman is less essential or almost entirely suppressed.”
Love: “To be loved means to be ablaze. To love is: to shine with inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to pass away; to love is to last.”
Intimate, stylistically masterful, brilliantly translated, and brimming with the wonder and passion of Rilke, The Poet’s Guide to Life is comparable to the best works of wisdom in all of literature and a perfect book for all occasions.
–RAINER MARIA RILKE
In this treasury of uncommon wisdom and spiritual insight, the best writings and personal philosophies of one of the twentieth century’s greatest poets, Rainer Maria Rilke, are gleaned by Ulrich Baer from thousands of pages of never-before translated correspondence.
The result is a profound vision of how the human drive to create and understand can guide us in every facet of life. Arranged by theme–from everyday existence with others to the exhilarations of love and the experience of loss, from dealing with adversity to the nature of inspiration, here are Rilke’s thoughts on how to live life in a meaningful way:
Life and Living: “How good life is. How fair, how incorruptible, how impossible to deceive: not even by strength, not even by willpower, and not even by courage. How everything remains what it is and has only this choice: to come true, or to exaggerate and push too far.”
Art: “The work of art is adjustment, balance, reassurance. It can be neither gloomy nor full of rosy hopes, for its essence consists of justice.”
Faith: “I personally feel a greater affinity to all those religions in which the middleman is less essential or almost entirely suppressed.”
Love: “To be loved means to be ablaze. To love is: to shine with inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to pass away; to love is to last.”
Intimate, stylistically masterful, brilliantly translated, and brimming with the wonder and passion of Rilke, The Poet’s Guide to Life is comparable to the best works of wisdom in all of literature and a perfect book for all occasions.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
RAINER MARIA RILKE (1875—1926) ranks among the great poets of world literature, and was the author of Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus.
Ulrich Baer, a scholar of modern German, French, and American poetry, is the author of Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Célan and Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma. He is the editor of 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11. Baer is associate professor of German and comparative literature at New York University and acting chair of the German department.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Ulrich Baer, a scholar of modern German, French, and American poetry, is the author of Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Célan and Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma. He is the editor of 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11. Baer is associate professor of German and comparative literature at New York University and acting chair of the German department.
- There is only a single, urgent task: to attach oneself someplace to nature, to that which is strong, striving and bright with unreserved readiness, and then to move forward in one’s efforts without any calculation or guile, even when engaged in the most trivial and mundane activities. Each time we thus reach out with joy, each time we cast our view toward distances that have not yet been touched, we transform not only the present moment and the one following but also alter the past within us, weave it into the pattern of our existence, and dissolve the foreign body of pain whose exact composition we ultimately do not know. Just as we do not know how much vital energy this foreign body, once it has been thus dissolved, might impart to our bloodstream!
·
If we wish to be let in on the secrets of life, we must be mindful of two things: first, there is the great melody to which things and scents, feelings and past lives, dawns and dreams contribute in equal measure, and then there are the individual voices that complete and perfect this full chorus. And to establish the basis for a work of art, that is, for an image of life lived more deeply, lived more than life as it is lived today, and as the possibility that it remains throughout the ages, we have to adjust and set into their proper relation these two voices: the one belonging to a specific moment and the other to the group of people living in it.
·
Wishes! Desires! What does life know about them? Life urges and pushes forward and it has its mighty nature into which we stare with our waiting eyes.
·
Life takes pride in not appearing uncomplicated. If it relied on simplicity, it probably would not succeed in moving us to do all those things that we are not easily moved to do . . .
·
A conscious fate that is aware of our existence . . . yes, how often we long for such a fate that would make us stronger and affirm us. But would such a fate not instantly become a fate that beholds us from the outside, observes us like a spectator, a fate that we would no longer be alone with? The fact that we have been placed into a “blind fate” that we inhabit allows us to have our own perspective and is the very condition of our perspicacious innocence. It is due only to the “blindness” of our fate that we are so profoundly related to the world’s wonderful density, which is to say to the totality that we cannot survey and that exceeds us.
·
Seeing is for us the most authentic possibility of acquiring something. If God had only made our hands to be like our eyes—so ready to grasp, so willing to relinquish all things—then we could truly acquire wealth. We do not acquire wealth by letting something remain and wilt in our hands but only by letting everything pass through their grasp as if through the festive gate of return and homecoming. Our hands ought not to be a coffin for us but a bed sheltering the twilight slumber and dreams of the things held there, out of whose depths their dearest secrets speak. Once out of our hands, however, things ought to move forward, now sturdy and strong, and we should keep nothing of them but the courageous morning melody that hovers and shimmers behind their fading steps.
For property is poverty and fear; only to have possessed something and to have let go of it means carefree ownership!
·
To look at something is such a wonderful thing of which we still know so little. When we look at something, we are turned completely toward the outside by this activity. But just when we are most turned toward the outside like that, things seem to take place within us that have longed for an unobserved moment, and while they unfold within us, whole and strangely anonymous, without us, their significance begins to take shape in the external object in the form of a strong, convincing, indeed their only possible name. And by means of this name we contentedly and respectfully recognize what is happening inside us without ourselves touching upon it. We understand it only quietly, entirely from a distance, under the sign of a thing that had just been alien and in the next instant is alienated from us again.
·
It does not happen frequently that something very great is condensed into a thing that can be held entirely in one hand, in one’s own, impotent hand. Just as when one finds a tiny bird that is thirsty. You take it away from the edge of death, and the little heartbeats increase gradually in the warm, trembling hand like the wave at the edge of a giant ocean for which you are the shore. And you suddenly realize, while holding this little recovering animal, that life is recovering from death. And you hold it up. Generations of birds, and all of the forests over which they pass, and all of the skies into which they will rise. And is any of this easy? No: you are very strong to carry the heaviest burden in such an hour.
·
Each experience has its own velocity according to which it wants to be lived if it is to be new, profound, and fruitful. To have wisdom means to discover this velocity in each individual case.
·
Wishes are the memories coming from our future!
·
Be out of sync with your times for just one day, and you will see how much eternity you contain within you.
·
After all, life is not even close to being as logically consistent as our worries; it has many more unexpected ideas and many more facets than we do.
·
My God, how magnificent life is precisely owing to its unforeseeability and to the often so strangely certain steps of our blindness.
·
Life has been created quite truthfully in order to surprise us (where it does not terrify us altogether).
·
How numerous and manifold is everything that is yet to come, and how differently it all surfaces and how differently it all passes from the way we expect. How poor we are in imagination, fantasy, and expectation, how lightly and superficially we take ourselves in making plans, only for reality then to arrive and play its melodies on us.
·
The longer I live, the more urgent it seems to me to endure and transcribe the whole dictation of existence up to its end, for it might just be the case that only the very last sentence contains that small and possibly inconspicuous word through which everything we had struggled to learn and everything we had failed to understand will be transformed suddenly into magnificent sense. And who can be sure if in the realm of the beyond it might not somehow matter that here we had reached precisely that end that was ultimately meant for us. There is also no certainty that new challenges might not confront us on the other side while we flee from here completely exhausted—challenges that the soul, as it finds itself shaken and without having been either summoned or prepared, would face even more than other tasks with a sense of shame.
·
It is not possible to have an adequate image of how inexhaustible the expansiveness and possibilities of life are. No fate, no rejection, no hardship is entirely without prospects; somewhere the densest shrub can yield leaves, a flower, a fruit. And somewhere in God’s furthest providence there surely exists already an insect that will gather riches from this flower or a hunger that will be sated by this fruit. And if this fruit is bitter it will have astonished at least one eye, and will have provided it pleasure and have triggered curiosity for the shapes and colors and crops of the shrub. And if the fruit were to fall, it would fall into the abundance of that which is yet to come. Even in its final decay it contributes to this future by turning it into more abundant, more colorful, and more urgent growth.
·
I have by now grown accustomed, to the degree that this is humanly possible, to grasp everything that we may encounter according to its particular intensity without worrying much about how long it will last. Ultimately, this may be the best and most direct way of expecting the utmost of everything—even its duration. If we allow an encounter with a given thing to be shaped by this expectation that it may last, every such experience will be spoiled and falsified, and ultimately it will be prevented from unfolding its most proper and authentic potential and fertility. All the things that cannot be gained through our pleading can be given to us only as something unexpected, something extra: this is why I am yet again confirmed in my belief that often nothing seems to matter in life but the longest patience.
·
Is not everything that happens to us, whether or not we desire or solicit it, always glorious and full of the purest, clearest justice?
·
What else does it mean to live but precisely this daring under- taking of filling a mold that one day will be broken off one’s new shoulders, so that, now free in this new metamorphosis, one may become acquainted with all the other beings that have been magically transported into the same realm?
·
We lead our lives so poorly because we arrive in the present always unprepared, incapable, and too distracted for everything.
·
It is possible to feel so very much abandoned at times. And so much depends on the tiny indulgence of things, whether we can cope at all when they suddenly don’t respond to us and don’t move us along. Then we stand there inside the paltriness of our body, all alone—it is just like when we were children, when “they” were angry with us and pretended not to see us. Then the things were equally disloyal and there occurred a brief moment of nonbeing that forced its way up to our heart and left room for nothing else. Suffering. For what is more being than precisely this heart, where the world alternates between becoming “object” and “self,” inside and opposite, longing and fusion—and the beats of which coincide occasionally perhaps with, God knows, what infinite other measures in outer space . . . (perhaps by chance).
·
Finally—we know this—life’s little wisdom is to wait (but to wait in the proper, pure state of mind), and the great grace that is bestowed on us in return is to survive . . .
·
How tremendous both life and death are as long as one does not incessantly consider both of them to be part of one greater whole while making hardly any distinctions between them. But this is precisely a task for angels and not our task, or rather ours only as an exception that might occur during moments that have been brought into existence slowly and painfully.
·
You have to live life to the limit, not according to each day but according to its depth. One does not have to do what comes next if one feels a greater affinity with that which happens later, at a remove, even in a remote distance. One may dream while others are saviors if these dreams are more real to oneself than reality and more necessary than bread. In a word: one ought to turn the most extreme possibility inside oneself into the measure for one’s life, for our life is vast and can accommodate as much future as we are able to carry.
·
Life has long since preempted every later possible impoverishment through its astoundingly immeasurable riches. So what is there for us to be afraid of? Only that this should be forgotten! But all around us, within us, how many ways of helping us remember!
·
The following realization rivals in its significance a religion: that once the background melody has been discovered one is no longer baffled in one’s speech and obscure in one’s decisions. There is a carefree security in the simple conviction that one is part of a melody, which means that one legitimately occupies a specific space and has a specific duty toward a vast work where the least counts as much as the greatest. Not to be extraneous is the first condition for an individual to consciously and quietly come into his own.
·
I want to thank you briefly for your letter; I can understand all of it quite well and can even follow you into your sadness, into this sadness that I know so deeply and which may of course be explained . . . And yet this sadness is nothing but a sensitive spot within us, always the same spot, one of those that can no longer be located once they begin to ache so that we fail to recognize and treat it when we are numb with pain. I know all of this. There is a kind of joy that is quite similar—and somehow we might have to get beyond both of them. I just recently thought that when I spent a few days climbing the steep mountains of Anacapri and was so filled with joy up there, so strenuously joyful in my soul. We let go of one or the other always yet again: this joyfulness and that sadness. We still do not own either of them. What do we amount to as long as we can get up and a wind, a gleam, a song wrought of the voices of a few birds in the air can seize us and do whatever it wants with us? It is good to hear all of this and to see it and to seize it, not to become numb toward it but on the contrary: everything is to be felt in countless ways in all its variations yet without losing ourselves to it. I once said to Rodin on an April day filled with spring: “How this [springtime] dissolves us and how we have to contribute to it with our own juices and make an effort to the point of exhaustion—don’t you also know this?” And he, who surely knew on his own how to seize spring, with a quick glance: “Ah—I have never paid attention to that.” That is what we have to learn: not to pay attention to certain things, to be too concentrated to touch in some sensitive spot the things that can never be reached with one’s entire being, to feel everything only with all of life—then much (that is too narrow) will be excluded but everything important will take place . . .
·
Life is so very true, when taken in its entirety, that even the lie (if it does not emanate from base motives) gloriously shares in this unwavering truth.
·
Life goes on, and it goes past a lot of people in a distance, and around those who wait it makes a detour.
·
Do not believe that everything strong and beautiful will end up as something “ugly and ordinary,” as you put it at this moment of inner turmoil—it cannot end this way because it does not end at all if it was something strong and beautiful. It continues to work its effects in unceasing transformations; it is only that these transformations frequently so vastly exceed our capacity to grasp and endure them. Frequently, when we are frozen by an event or if an event sheds its leaves and petals in front of our eyes in some other violent way, we dig up the soil around it in horror and shrink back from the ugliness of its roots where that which looks to us like transience lives. We have such a limited capacity to be just toward all phenomena and we are so quick to call ugly, as if turning spitefully and vengefully against ourselves, anything that simply does not correspond to the notion of beauty to which we subscribe at that moment. This is often nothing more than a—though often nearly intolerable—shifting of our attention; the clustered appearances of life are still so terribly disconnected and incompatible for our perception. Take a walk in the woods on a spring day. It’s enough for us to allow our gaze to wander briefly into another category of existence to be facing destruction and disintegration rather than to be looking at life, and to perceive instead of joy, desolation; to feel instead of harmonious vibrations petrified, even exiled, from any insight and participation and commonality. But what does this say against spring? What against the forest? What against us? What, finally, against our possibilities to relate to and to recognize each other? Wherever our attention is thus redirected...
·
If we wish to be let in on the secrets of life, we must be mindful of two things: first, there is the great melody to which things and scents, feelings and past lives, dawns and dreams contribute in equal measure, and then there are the individual voices that complete and perfect this full chorus. And to establish the basis for a work of art, that is, for an image of life lived more deeply, lived more than life as it is lived today, and as the possibility that it remains throughout the ages, we have to adjust and set into their proper relation these two voices: the one belonging to a specific moment and the other to the group of people living in it.
·
Wishes! Desires! What does life know about them? Life urges and pushes forward and it has its mighty nature into which we stare with our waiting eyes.
·
Life takes pride in not appearing uncomplicated. If it relied on simplicity, it probably would not succeed in moving us to do all those things that we are not easily moved to do . . .
·
A conscious fate that is aware of our existence . . . yes, how often we long for such a fate that would make us stronger and affirm us. But would such a fate not instantly become a fate that beholds us from the outside, observes us like a spectator, a fate that we would no longer be alone with? The fact that we have been placed into a “blind fate” that we inhabit allows us to have our own perspective and is the very condition of our perspicacious innocence. It is due only to the “blindness” of our fate that we are so profoundly related to the world’s wonderful density, which is to say to the totality that we cannot survey and that exceeds us.
·
Seeing is for us the most authentic possibility of acquiring something. If God had only made our hands to be like our eyes—so ready to grasp, so willing to relinquish all things—then we could truly acquire wealth. We do not acquire wealth by letting something remain and wilt in our hands but only by letting everything pass through their grasp as if through the festive gate of return and homecoming. Our hands ought not to be a coffin for us but a bed sheltering the twilight slumber and dreams of the things held there, out of whose depths their dearest secrets speak. Once out of our hands, however, things ought to move forward, now sturdy and strong, and we should keep nothing of them but the courageous morning melody that hovers and shimmers behind their fading steps.
For property is poverty and fear; only to have possessed something and to have let go of it means carefree ownership!
·
To look at something is such a wonderful thing of which we still know so little. When we look at something, we are turned completely toward the outside by this activity. But just when we are most turned toward the outside like that, things seem to take place within us that have longed for an unobserved moment, and while they unfold within us, whole and strangely anonymous, without us, their significance begins to take shape in the external object in the form of a strong, convincing, indeed their only possible name. And by means of this name we contentedly and respectfully recognize what is happening inside us without ourselves touching upon it. We understand it only quietly, entirely from a distance, under the sign of a thing that had just been alien and in the next instant is alienated from us again.
·
It does not happen frequently that something very great is condensed into a thing that can be held entirely in one hand, in one’s own, impotent hand. Just as when one finds a tiny bird that is thirsty. You take it away from the edge of death, and the little heartbeats increase gradually in the warm, trembling hand like the wave at the edge of a giant ocean for which you are the shore. And you suddenly realize, while holding this little recovering animal, that life is recovering from death. And you hold it up. Generations of birds, and all of the forests over which they pass, and all of the skies into which they will rise. And is any of this easy? No: you are very strong to carry the heaviest burden in such an hour.
·
Each experience has its own velocity according to which it wants to be lived if it is to be new, profound, and fruitful. To have wisdom means to discover this velocity in each individual case.
·
Wishes are the memories coming from our future!
·
Be out of sync with your times for just one day, and you will see how much eternity you contain within you.
·
After all, life is not even close to being as logically consistent as our worries; it has many more unexpected ideas and many more facets than we do.
·
My God, how magnificent life is precisely owing to its unforeseeability and to the often so strangely certain steps of our blindness.
·
Life has been created quite truthfully in order to surprise us (where it does not terrify us altogether).
·
How numerous and manifold is everything that is yet to come, and how differently it all surfaces and how differently it all passes from the way we expect. How poor we are in imagination, fantasy, and expectation, how lightly and superficially we take ourselves in making plans, only for reality then to arrive and play its melodies on us.
·
The longer I live, the more urgent it seems to me to endure and transcribe the whole dictation of existence up to its end, for it might just be the case that only the very last sentence contains that small and possibly inconspicuous word through which everything we had struggled to learn and everything we had failed to understand will be transformed suddenly into magnificent sense. And who can be sure if in the realm of the beyond it might not somehow matter that here we had reached precisely that end that was ultimately meant for us. There is also no certainty that new challenges might not confront us on the other side while we flee from here completely exhausted—challenges that the soul, as it finds itself shaken and without having been either summoned or prepared, would face even more than other tasks with a sense of shame.
·
It is not possible to have an adequate image of how inexhaustible the expansiveness and possibilities of life are. No fate, no rejection, no hardship is entirely without prospects; somewhere the densest shrub can yield leaves, a flower, a fruit. And somewhere in God’s furthest providence there surely exists already an insect that will gather riches from this flower or a hunger that will be sated by this fruit. And if this fruit is bitter it will have astonished at least one eye, and will have provided it pleasure and have triggered curiosity for the shapes and colors and crops of the shrub. And if the fruit were to fall, it would fall into the abundance of that which is yet to come. Even in its final decay it contributes to this future by turning it into more abundant, more colorful, and more urgent growth.
·
I have by now grown accustomed, to the degree that this is humanly possible, to grasp everything that we may encounter according to its particular intensity without worrying much about how long it will last. Ultimately, this may be the best and most direct way of expecting the utmost of everything—even its duration. If we allow an encounter with a given thing to be shaped by this expectation that it may last, every such experience will be spoiled and falsified, and ultimately it will be prevented from unfolding its most proper and authentic potential and fertility. All the things that cannot be gained through our pleading can be given to us only as something unexpected, something extra: this is why I am yet again confirmed in my belief that often nothing seems to matter in life but the longest patience.
·
Is not everything that happens to us, whether or not we desire or solicit it, always glorious and full of the purest, clearest justice?
·
What else does it mean to live but precisely this daring under- taking of filling a mold that one day will be broken off one’s new shoulders, so that, now free in this new metamorphosis, one may become acquainted with all the other beings that have been magically transported into the same realm?
·
We lead our lives so poorly because we arrive in the present always unprepared, incapable, and too distracted for everything.
·
It is possible to feel so very much abandoned at times. And so much depends on the tiny indulgence of things, whether we can cope at all when they suddenly don’t respond to us and don’t move us along. Then we stand there inside the paltriness of our body, all alone—it is just like when we were children, when “they” were angry with us and pretended not to see us. Then the things were equally disloyal and there occurred a brief moment of nonbeing that forced its way up to our heart and left room for nothing else. Suffering. For what is more being than precisely this heart, where the world alternates between becoming “object” and “self,” inside and opposite, longing and fusion—and the beats of which coincide occasionally perhaps with, God knows, what infinite other measures in outer space . . . (perhaps by chance).
·
Finally—we know this—life’s little wisdom is to wait (but to wait in the proper, pure state of mind), and the great grace that is bestowed on us in return is to survive . . .
·
How tremendous both life and death are as long as one does not incessantly consider both of them to be part of one greater whole while making hardly any distinctions between them. But this is precisely a task for angels and not our task, or rather ours only as an exception that might occur during moments that have been brought into existence slowly and painfully.
·
You have to live life to the limit, not according to each day but according to its depth. One does not have to do what comes next if one feels a greater affinity with that which happens later, at a remove, even in a remote distance. One may dream while others are saviors if these dreams are more real to oneself than reality and more necessary than bread. In a word: one ought to turn the most extreme possibility inside oneself into the measure for one’s life, for our life is vast and can accommodate as much future as we are able to carry.
·
Life has long since preempted every later possible impoverishment through its astoundingly immeasurable riches. So what is there for us to be afraid of? Only that this should be forgotten! But all around us, within us, how many ways of helping us remember!
·
The following realization rivals in its significance a religion: that once the background melody has been discovered one is no longer baffled in one’s speech and obscure in one’s decisions. There is a carefree security in the simple conviction that one is part of a melody, which means that one legitimately occupies a specific space and has a specific duty toward a vast work where the least counts as much as the greatest. Not to be extraneous is the first condition for an individual to consciously and quietly come into his own.
·
I want to thank you briefly for your letter; I can understand all of it quite well and can even follow you into your sadness, into this sadness that I know so deeply and which may of course be explained . . . And yet this sadness is nothing but a sensitive spot within us, always the same spot, one of those that can no longer be located once they begin to ache so that we fail to recognize and treat it when we are numb with pain. I know all of this. There is a kind of joy that is quite similar—and somehow we might have to get beyond both of them. I just recently thought that when I spent a few days climbing the steep mountains of Anacapri and was so filled with joy up there, so strenuously joyful in my soul. We let go of one or the other always yet again: this joyfulness and that sadness. We still do not own either of them. What do we amount to as long as we can get up and a wind, a gleam, a song wrought of the voices of a few birds in the air can seize us and do whatever it wants with us? It is good to hear all of this and to see it and to seize it, not to become numb toward it but on the contrary: everything is to be felt in countless ways in all its variations yet without losing ourselves to it. I once said to Rodin on an April day filled with spring: “How this [springtime] dissolves us and how we have to contribute to it with our own juices and make an effort to the point of exhaustion—don’t you also know this?” And he, who surely knew on his own how to seize spring, with a quick glance: “Ah—I have never paid attention to that.” That is what we have to learn: not to pay attention to certain things, to be too concentrated to touch in some sensitive spot the things that can never be reached with one’s entire being, to feel everything only with all of life—then much (that is too narrow) will be excluded but everything important will take place . . .
·
Life is so very true, when taken in its entirety, that even the lie (if it does not emanate from base motives) gloriously shares in this unwavering truth.
·
Life goes on, and it goes past a lot of people in a distance, and around those who wait it makes a detour.
·
Do not believe that everything strong and beautiful will end up as something “ugly and ordinary,” as you put it at this moment of inner turmoil—it cannot end this way because it does not end at all if it was something strong and beautiful. It continues to work its effects in unceasing transformations; it is only that these transformations frequently so vastly exceed our capacity to grasp and endure them. Frequently, when we are frozen by an event or if an event sheds its leaves and petals in front of our eyes in some other violent way, we dig up the soil around it in horror and shrink back from the ugliness of its roots where that which looks to us like transience lives. We have such a limited capacity to be just toward all phenomena and we are so quick to call ugly, as if turning spitefully and vengefully against ourselves, anything that simply does not correspond to the notion of beauty to which we subscribe at that moment. This is often nothing more than a—though often nearly intolerable—shifting of our attention; the clustered appearances of life are still so terribly disconnected and incompatible for our perception. Take a walk in the woods on a spring day. It’s enough for us to allow our gaze to wander briefly into another category of existence to be facing destruction and disintegration rather than to be looking at life, and to perceive instead of joy, desolation; to feel instead of harmonious vibrations petrified, even exiled, from any insight and participation and commonality. But what does this say against spring? What against the forest? What against us? What, finally, against our possibilities to relate to and to recognize each other? Wherever our attention is thus redirected...
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- PublisherModern Library
- Publication date2005
- ISBN 10 0679642927
- ISBN 13 9780679642923
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The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke
Published by
Modern Library
(2005)
ISBN 10: 0679642927
ISBN 13: 9780679642923
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THE POET'S GUIDE TO LIFE: THE WI
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Modern Library
(2005)
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The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke
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(2005)
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The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke
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(2005)
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ISBN 13: 9780679642923
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The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke
Published by
Modern Library
(2005)
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ISBN 13: 9780679642923
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The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke
Published by
Modern Library
(2005)
ISBN 10: 0679642927
ISBN 13: 9780679642923
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