The Wisdom of Rilke, Part 2

The Poet's Guide to Life
by Rainer Maria Rilke

(Page 2 of 4)

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.

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Is not everything that happens to us, whether or not we desire or solicit it, always glorious and full of the purest, clearest justice?

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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?

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We lead our lives so poorly because we arrive in the present always unprepared, incapable, and too distracted for everything.

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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).

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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 . . .

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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 . . .

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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.

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Life goes on, and it goes past a lot of people in a distance, and around those who wait it makes a detour.

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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 in our soul, in our interiority, it is of course all the more assaulting and disturbing - but one would call this shift "ugly and common" only if one recognized it as nothing but a conventional disillusionment or disappointment and not as the task to grasp an unceasingly particu- lar, unique and incomparable metamorphosis in all of its peculiar reality.

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Copyright © 2005 by Rainer Maria Rilke. Excerpted by permission of Modern Library, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

Rainer Maria Rilke (4 December 1875 - 29 December 1926) is generally considered the German language's greatest 20th century poet. His haunting images tend to focus on the problems of Christianity in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety, themes that sometimes place him in the school of modernist poets.