01c. 1900 ADDo you remember how this life of yours longed in childhood to belong to the grown-ups? I can see that it now longs to move on from them and is drawn to those who are greater yet. That is why it does not cease to be difficult, but also why it will not cease to grow.Rainer Maria Rilke / quote ↗
02c. 1900 ADSo it's back once more, back up the slope.Why do they always ruin my ropewith their cuts?I felt so ready the other day,Had a real foretaste of eternityIn my guts.Spoonfeeding me yet another sipfrom life's cup.I don't want it, won't take any more of it.Let me throw up.Life is medium rare and good, I see,And the world full of soup and bread,But it won't pass into the blood for me,Just goes to my head.It makes me ill, though others it feeds;Do see that I must deny it!For a thousand years from now at leastI'm keeping a diet.Rainer Maria Rilke / quote ↗
03c. 1900 ADYou, yesterday’s boy,to whom confusion came:Listen, lest you forget who you are.It was not pleasure you fell into. It was joy.You were called to be bridegroom,though the bride coming toward you is your shame.What chose you is the great desire.Now all flesh bares itself to you.On pious images pale cheeksblush with a strange fire.Your senses uncoil like snakesawakened by the beat of the tambourine.Then suddenly you’re left all alonewith your body that can’t love youand your will that can’t save you.But now, like a whispering in dark streets,rumors of God run through your dark blood.Rainer Maria Rilke / quote ↗
04c. 1900 ADHave patience with everything unresolved in you heart and try to love the questions themselves. It is possible to live and not know.Rainer Maria Rilke / quote ↗
05c. 1900 ADYet, no matter how deeply I go down into myself, my God is dark, and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence.Rainer Maria Rilke / quote ↗
06c. 1900 ADYet, no matter how deeply I go down into myself, my God is dark, and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence. I know that my trunk rose from his warmth, but that's all, because my branches hardly move at all near the ground, and just wave a little in the wind.Rainer Maria Rilke / quote ↗
07c. 1900 ADPerhaps everything terrible is, in its deepest being, something that needs our love.Rainer Maria Rilke / quote ↗
08c. 1900 ADI love the dark hours of my being.My mind deepens into them.There I can find, as in old letters,the days of my life, already lived,and held like a legend, and understood.Rainer Maria Rilke / quote ↗
09c. 1900 ADHis gaze, bluntedby the unnumbered processionof iron bars, uncountedas his softly padded steps.Smooth motion of blood and sinewturning in its own, small circleprescribed by bars and walls...and skin, confined.Suddenly, without warning,a flash of light and imagepierces the caged brain,and passing through its beating heartto stillness finds its way.Rainer Maria Rilke / quote ↗
10c. 1900 ADEven when the lights go out, even when someone says to me: "It's over---," even when from the stage a gray gust of emptiness drifts toward me,even when not one silent ancestor sits beside me anymore---not a woman, not even the boy with the brown squint-eye:I'll sit here anyway. One can always watch.Rainer Maria Rilke / quote ↗
11c. 1900 ADAlready the ripening barberries are redAnd the old asters hardly breathe in their beds.The man who is not rich now as summer goesWill wait and wait and never be himself.The man who cannot quietly close his eyescertain that there is vision after vision inside,simply waiting for nighttimeto rise all around him in darkness-it's all over for him, he's like an old man.Nothing else will come; no more days will openand everything that does happen will cheat him.Even you, my God. And you are like a stonethat draws him daily deeper into the depths.Rainer Maria Rilke / quote ↗
12c. 1900 ADmost people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth.Rainer Maria Rilke / quote ↗
13c. 1900 ADWhoever you are, go out into the evening,leaving your room, of which you know every bit;your house is the last before the infinite,whoever you are.Rainer Maria Rilke / quote ↗
14c. 1900 ADOnly he whose bright lyrehas sounded in shadowsmay, looking onward, restorehis infinite praise. Only he who has eatenpoppies with the deadwill not lose ever againthe gentlest chord.Though the image upon the pooloften grows dim:Know and be still.Inside the Double Worldall voices becomeeternally mild.Rainer Maria Rilke / quote ↗
15c. 1900 ADWe have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience.Rainer Maria Rilke / quote ↗
16c. 1900 ADFor even the best err in words when they are meant to mean most delicate and almost inexpressible things.Rainer Maria Rilke / quote ↗
17c. 1900 ADEverything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating.Rainer Maria Rilke / quote ↗
18c. 1900 ADweren’t you alwaysdistracted by expectation, as if every eventannounced a beloved? (Where can you find a placeto keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside yougoing and coming and often staying all night.)…Rainer Maria Rilke / quote ↗
19c. 1900 ADI would like to sing someone to sleep,to sit beside someone and be there.I would like to rock you and sing softlyand go with you to and from sleep.I would like to be the one in the housewho knew: The night was cold.And I would like to listen in and listen outinto you, into the world, into the woods.The clocks shout to one another striking,and one sees to the bottom of time.And down below one last, strange man walks byand rouses a strange dog.And after that comes silence.I have laid my eyes upon you wide;and they hold you gently and let you gowhen something stirs in the dark.Rainer Maria Rilke / quote ↗
20c. 1900 ADNo, my life is not this precipitous hourthrough which you see me passing at a run.Rainer Maria Rilke / quote ↗
22c. 1900 ADThey all have tired mouthsand bright seamless souls.And a longing (as for sin)sometimes haunts their dreams.They are almost all alike; in God's gardens they keep still,like many, many intervalsin his might and melody.Only when they spread their wingsare they wakers of a wind:as if God with his broad sculptor-hands leafed through the pagesin the dark book of the beginning.Rainer Maria Rilke / quote ↗
24c. 1900 ADOur age has built itself vast reservoirs of power / formless as the straining energy that it wrests from the earth.Rainer Maria Rilke / quote ↗
