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Letters on Life
by Rainer Maria Rilke
List Price: 13.95
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Paperback: 272 pages
Publisher: Modern Library (April 11 2006)
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Read an Excerpt

Part One
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

Part Two
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.



Book Description

Gleaned from Rainer Maria Rilke's voluminous, never-before-translated correspondence, this volume offers the best writings and personal philosophy of one of the twentieth century's greatest poets. 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 infuse everyday life with beauty, wonder, and meaning.

Intimate, stylistically masterful, brilliantly translated and assembled, and brimming with the passion of Rilke, Letters on Life is a font of wisdom and a perfect book for all occasions.

About the Author

Rainer Maria RilkeRainer Maria Rilke

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.

He wrote in both verse and a highly lyrical prose.

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Ulrich Baer, Ph.D.Ulrich Baer, Ph.D.

Ulrich Baer is the author of Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan, and 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 chair of the German department..

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