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You, Beloved, Who Are All The Gardens I Have Ever Gazed At, Longing. An Open Window In A Country House - , And You Almost Stepped Out, Pensive, To Meet Me. Streets That I Chanced Upon, - You Had Just Walked Down Them And Vanished. And Sometimes, In A Shop, The Mirrors Were Still Dizzy With Your Presence And, Startled, Gave Back My Too-sudden Image. Who Knows? Perhaps The Same Bird Echoed Through Both Of Us Yesterday, Separate, In The Evening.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

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You, Beloved, Who Are

Rainer Maria Rilke

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You, Beloved, Who Are All The Gardens I Have Ever Gazed At, Longing. An Open Window In A Country House - , And You Almost Stepped Out, Pensive, To Meet Me. Streets That I Chanced Upon, - You Had Just Walked Down Them And Vanished. And Sometimes, In A Shop, The Mirrors Were Still Dizzy With Your Presence And, Startled, Gave Back My Too-sudden Image. Who Knows? Perhaps The Same Bird Echoed Through Both Of Us Yesterday, Separate, In The Evening.

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And I Circle Ten Thousand Years Long; And I Still Don't Know If I'm A Falcon, A Storm, Or An Unfinished Song

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Not Since Moses Has Anyone Seen A Mountain So Greatly.

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The Highest Form Of Love Is To Be The Protector Of Another Person’s Solitude.

Now I Come To You Full Of Future. And From Habit We Begin To Live Our Past.

You, Darkness, Of Whom I Am Born- I Love You More Than The Flame That Limits The World To The Circle It Illumines And Excludes The Rest.

I Love You More

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There Is Time Only To Work Slowly There Is No Time Not To Love

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In The Night, I Wish To Speak With The Angel To Find Out If She Recognizes My Eyes, If She Will Ask Me: Do You See Eden? And I’ll Reply: Eden Burns.

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Everything Is Gestation And Then Birthing.

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Destiny Itself Is Like A Wonderful Wide Tapestry In Which Every Thread Is Guided By An Unspeakable Tender Hand, Placed Beside Another Thread And Held And Carried By A Hundred Others.

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He Reproduced Himself With So Much Humble Objectivity, With The Unquestioning, Matter Of Fact Interest Of A Dog Who Sees Himself In A Mirror And Thinks: There's Another Dog.

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I Know Of No Other Advice Than This: Go Within And Scale The Depths Of Your Being From Which Your Very Life Springs Forth.

Where I Create, There I Am True.

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Whoever Has No House Now, Will Never Have One. Whoever Is Alone Will Stay Alone, Will Sit, Read, Write Long Letters Through The Evening, And Wander On The Boulevards, Up And Down, Restlessly, While Dry Leaves Are Blowing.

Often A Star Was Waiting For You To Notice It. A Wave Rolled Toward You Out Of The Distant Path, Or As You Walked Under An Open Window, A Violin Yielded Itself To Your Hearing. All This Was Mission.

The Only Sadnesses That Are Dangerous And Unhealthy Are The Ones That We Carry Around In Public In Order To Drown Them Out With The Noise; Like Diseases That Are Treated Superficially And Foolishly, They Just Withdraw And After A Short Interval Break Out Again All The More Terribly; And Gather Inside Us And Are Life, Are Life That Is Unlived, Rejected, Lost, Life That We Can Die Of.

To Have A Childhood Means To Live A Thousand Lives Before The One.

Why Don't You Conceive Of God As An Ally Who Is Coming, Who Has Been Approaching Since Time Began, The One Who Will Someday Arrive, The Fruit Of A Tree Whose Leaves We Are? Why Not Project His Birth Into The Future, And Live Your Life As An Excruciating And Lyrical Moment In The History Of A Prodigious Pregnancy?

Wishes Are Recollections Coming From The Future.

We Wasters Of Sorrows! How We Stare Away Into Sad Endurance Beyond Them, Trying To Foresee Their End! Whereas They Are Nothing Else Than Our Winter Foliage, Our Sombre Evergreen, One Of The Seasons Of Our Interior Year.

To All That Is Used-up, And To All The Muffled And Dumb Creatures In The World's Full Reserve, The Unsayable Sums, Joyfully Add Yourself, And Cancel The Count.

Life Is Heavier Than The Weight Of All Things.

Who Speaks Of Conquering? To Endure Is Everything.

For Our Part, When We Feel, We Evaporate; Ah, We Breathe Ourselves Out And Away; With Each New Heartfire We Give Off A Fainter Scent. True, Someone May Tell Us: You're In My Blood, This Room, Spring Itself Is Filled With You . . . To What End? He Can't Hold Us, We Vanish Within Him And Around Him.

To Write Rhythmic Prose One Must Go Deep Into Oneself And Find The Anonymous And Multiple Rhythm Of The Blood. Prose Needs To Be Built Like A Cathedral. There, One Is Truly Without A Name, Without Ambition, Without Help; On Scaffoldings, Alone With One's Consciousness.

If Your Everyday Life Appears To Be Unworthy Subject Matter, Do Not Complain To Life. Complain To Yourself, Lament That You Are Not Poet Enough To Call Up Its Wealth.

Beauty Is Only The Start Of Bearable Terror.

For Bel.i.eve Me, The More One Is, The Richer Is All One Experiences. And Whoever Wants To Have Deep Love In His Life Must Collect And Save For It And Gather Honey.

Think... Of The World You Carry Within You.

Society Has Been Able To Create Refuges Of Every Sort, For Since It Preferred To Take Love-life As An Amusement, It Also Had To Give It An Easy Form, Cheap, Safe, And Sure, As Public Amusements Are.

If You Will Cling To Nature, To The Simple In Nature, To The Little Things That Hardly Anyone Sees, And That Can So Unexpectedly Become Big And Beyond Measuring; If You Have This Love Of Inconsiderable Things And Seek Quite Simply, As One Who Serves, To Win The Confidence Of What Seems Poor: Then Everything Will Become Easier, More Coherent And Somehow More Conciliatory For You, Not In Your Intellect, Perhaps, Which Lags Marveling Behind, But In Your Inmost Consciousness, Waking And Cognizance.

Why Should You Want To Give Up A Child's Wise Not-understanding In Exchange For Defensiveness And Scorn, Since Not-understanding Is, After All, A Way Of Being Alone, Whereas Defensiveness And Scorn Are A Participation In Precisely What, By These Means, You Want To Separate Yourself From.

Beauty Is Nothing But The Beginning Of Terror, Which We Are Still Just Able To Endure, And We Are So Awed Because It Serenely Disdains To Annihilate Us.

It Is Good To Be Solitary, For Solitude Is Difficult; That Something Is Difficult Must Be A Reason The More For Us To Do It.

Ah, How Good It Is To Be Among People Who Are Reading!

Once The Realization Is Accepted That Even Between The Closest Human Beings Infinite Distances Continue, A Wonderful Living Side By Side Can Grow, If They Succeed In Loving The Distance Between Them Which Makes It Possible For Each To See The Other Whole Against The Sky.

If We Surrendered To Earth's Intelligence We Could Rise Up Rooted, Like Trees.

I Want To Love The Things As No One Has Thought To Love Them.

Whoever 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.

What Is Necessary, After All, Is Only This: Solitude, Vast Inner Solitude. To Walk Inside Yourself And Meet No One For Hours-that Is What You Must Be Able To Attain. To Be Solitary As You Were When You Were A Child.

Where Something Becomes Extremely Difficult And Unbearable, There We Also Stand Always Already Quite Near Its Transformation.

Let Everything Happen To You Beauty And Terror Just Keep Going No Feeling Is Final

Trees Do Not Force Their Sap, Nor Does The Flower Push Its Bloom.

Love Is Something Difficult And It Is More Difficult Than Other Things Because In Other Conflicts Nature Herself Enjoins Men To Collect Themselves, To Take Themselves Firmly In The Hand With All Their Strength, While In The Heightening Of Love The Impulse Is To Give Oneself Wholly Away.

Love Consists In This, That Two Solitudes Protect And Touch And Greet Each Other.

Religion Is Something Infinitely Simple, Ingenuous. It Is Not Knowledge, Not Content Of Feeling... It Is Not Duty And Not Renunciation, It Is Not Restriction: But In The Infinite Extent Of The Universe It Is A Direction Of The Heart.

She Followed Slowly, Taking A Long Time, As Though There Were Some Obstacles In The Way; And Yet: As Though, Once It Was Overcome, She Would Be Beyond All Walking, And Would Fly.

Your Solitude Will Expand And Become A Place Where You Can Live In The Twilight, Where The Noise Of Other People Passes, Far In The Distance.

There Are Quite A Number Of People In The Reading-room; But One Is Not Aware Of Them. They Are Inside The Books. They Move, Sometimes, Within The Pages Like Sleepers Turning Over Between Two Dreams. Ah, How Good It Is To Be Among People Who Are Reading.

I Don't Want To Stay Folded Anywhere, Because Where I Am Folded, There I Am A Lie.

Ask Yourself In The Most Silent Hour Of Your Night: Must I Write [create]? Dig Into Yourself For A Deep Answer.

Irony: Don't Let Yourself Be Controlled By It, Especially During Uncreative Moments.

We Are Unutterably Alone Essentially, Especially In The Things Most Intimate And Most Important.

Lord, It Is Time. The Summer Was Very Big. Lay Thy Shadow On The Sundials, And On The Meadows Let The Winds Go Loose. Command The Last Fruits That They Shall Be Full; Give Them Another Two More Southerly Days, Press Them On To Fulfillment And Drive The Last Sweetiness Into The Heavenly Wine.

Works Of Art Always Spring From Those Who Have Faced The Danger, Gone To The Very End Of An Experience, To The Point Beyond Which No Human Being Can Go. The Further One Dares To Go, The More Decent, The More Personal, The More Unique A Life Becomes.

Do You Recall, From Your Childhood On, How Very Much This Life Of Yours Has Longed For Greatness? I See It Now, How From The Vantage Point Of Greatness It Longs For Even Greater Greatness. That Is Why It Does Not Let Up Being Difficult, But That Is Also Why It Will Not Cease To Grow.

Spring Has Again Returned. The Earth Is Like A Child That Knows Many Poems. Many, O So Many. For The Hardship Of Such Long Learning She Receives The Prize. Strict Was Her Teacher. The White In The Old Man's Beard Pleases Us. Now, What To Call Green, To Call Blue, We Dare To Ask: She Knows, She Knows!

Whoever Now Makes Himself Bigger, Freer And More Human In His Own Existence, Is Doing His Part Toward Peace, — As Yet It Must Be Worked At In An Inward Direction, Not Until A Few Have It All Big And Ready Within Them Can It Let Itself Be Brought Into The World.

There Would Have To Be Bread, Some Rich, Whole-grain Bread And Zwieback, And Perhaps On A Long, Narrow Dish Some Pale Westphalian Ham Laced With Strips Of White Fat Like An Evening Sky With Bands Of Clouds. There Would Be Some Tea Ready To Be Drunk, Yellowish Golden Tea In Glasses With Silver Saucers, Giving Off A Faint Fragrance.

[a]t Bottom, And Just In The Deepest And Most Important Things, We Are Unutterably Alone, And For One Person To Be Able To Advise Or Even Help Another, A Lot Must Happen, A Lot Must Go Well, A Whole Constellation Of Things Must Come Right In Order Once To Succeed.

It Is Clear That We Must Trust What Is Difficult; Everything Alive Trusts In It, Everything In Nature Grows And Defends Itself Any Way It Can And Is Spontaneously Itself, Tries To Be Itself At All Costs And Against All Opposition. We Know Little, But That We Must Trust In What Is Difficult Is A Certainty That Will Never Abandon Us; It Is Good To Be Solitary, For Solitude Is Difficult; That Something Is Difficult Must Be One More Reason For Us To Do It.

What Is Needed Is, In The End, Simply This: Solitude, Great Inner Solitude.

Be Ahead Of All Parting, As Though It Already Were Behind You, Like The Winter That Has Just Gone By. For Among These Winters There Is One So Endlessly Winter That Only By Wintering Through It Will Your Heart Survive.

And We, Spectators Always, Everywhere, Looking At, Never Out Of, Everything! It Fills Us. We Arrange It. It Collapses. We Re-arrange It, And Collapse Ourselves. Who's Turned Us Round Like This, So That We Always, Do What We May, Retain The Attitude Of Someone Who's Departing? Just As He, On The Last Hill, That Shows Him All His Valley For The Last Time, Will Turn And Stop And Linger, We Live Our Lives, For Ever Taking Leave.

Do Not, Do Not, Do Not Books For Ever Hammer At People Like Perpetual Bells? When, Between Two Books, Silent Sky Appears: Be Glad

And Still It Is Not Enough To Have Memories. One Must Be Able To Forget Them When They Are Many, And One Must Have The Great Patience To Wait Until They Come Again. For It Is Not Yet The Memories Themselves. Not Until They Have Turned To Blood Within Us, To Glance, To Gesture, Nameless And No Longer To Be Distinguished From Ourselves - Not Until Then Can It Happen That In A Most Rare Hour The First Word Of A Verse Arises In Their Midst And Goes Forth From Them.

Rose, Oh Pure Contradiction, Joy Of Being No-one's Sleep Under So Many Lids.

Our Task Is To Listen To The News That Is Always Arriving Out Of Silence.

My Life Is Not This Steeply Sloping Hour, In Which You See Me Hurrying. Much Stands Behind Me; I Stand Before It Like A Tree; I Am Only One Of My Many Mouths, And At That, The One That Will Be Still The Soonest. I Am The Rest Between Two Notes, Which Are Somehow Always In Discord Because Death’s Note Wants To Climb Over— But In The Dark Interval, Reconciled, They Stay There Trembling. And The Song Goes On, Beautiful.

It Wasn't His, It Wasn't My Fault, We Both Had Nothing Except Patience, But Death Has None. I Saw Him Come (how Meanly!) And I Watched Him As He Took And Took: None Of It I Could Claim As Mine.

There Exists A Creature Which Is Perfectly Harmless; When It Passes Before Your Eyes You Scarcely Notice It And Forget It Again Immediately. But As Soon As It Invisibly Gets Somehow Into Your Ears, It Develops There, It Hatches, As It Were, And Cases Have Been Known Where It Was Penetrated Even Into The Brain And Has Thriven Devastatingly In That Organ, Like Those Pneumococci In Dogs That Gain Entrance Through The Nose.this Creature Is One's Neighbor.

That’s Love: Two Lonely Persons Keep Each Other Safe And Touch Each Other And Talk To Each Other.

I Am Much Too Alone In This World, Yet Not Alone Enough

Winning Does Not Tempt That Man. This Is How He Grows: By Being Defeated, Decisively, By Constantly Greater Beings.

If Only We Arrange Our Life According To That Principle Which Counsels Us That We Must Hold To The Difficult, Then That Which Now Still Seems To Us The Most Alien Will Become What We Most Trust And Find Most Faithful.

Embrace Your Solitude And Love It. Endure The Pain It Causes, And Try To Sing Out With It. For Those Near To You Are Distant.

Again And Again In History Some People Wake Up. They Have No Ground In The Crowd And Move To Broader Deeper Laws. They Carry Strange Customs With Them And Demand Room For Bold And Audacious Action. The Future Speaks Ruthlessly Through Them. They Change The World.

His Vision, From The Constantly Passing Bars, Has Grown So Weary That It Cannot Hold Anything Else. It Seems To Him There Are A Thousand Bars, And Behind The Bars, No World. As He Paces In Cramped Circles, Over And Over, The Movement Of His Powerful Soft Strides Is Like A Ritual Dance Around A Center In Which A Mighty Will Stands Paralyzed. Only At Times, The Curtain Of The Pupils Lifts, Quietly. An Image Enters In, Rushes Down Through The Tense, Arrested Muscles, Plunges Into The Heart And Is Gone.

Weren't You Always Distracted By Expectation, As If Every Event Announced A Beloved? (where Can You Find A Place To Keep Her, With All The Huge Strange Thoughts Inside You Going And Coming And Often Staying All Night.).

Look, Lovers: Almost Separately They Come Towards Us Through The Flowery Grass And Slowly; Parting's So Far From Thought Of, They Indulge The Extravagance Of Walking Unembraced.

Let Life Happen To You. Believe Me: Life Is In The Right, Always.

I Never Read Anything Concerning My Work. I Feel That Criticism Is A Letter To The Public Which The Author, Since It Is Not Directed To Him, Does Not Have To Open And Read.

Truly It Is Glorious, Our Being Here.

Shattered People Are Best Represented By Bits And Pieces.

Things Aren't All So Tangible And Sayable As People Would Usually Have Us Believe; Most Experiences Are Unsayable, They Happen In A Space That No Word Has Ever Entered, And More Unsayable Than All Other Things Are Works Of Art, Those Mysterious Existences, Whose Life Endures Beside Our Own Small, Transitory Life

Read As Little As Possible Of Literary Criticism - Such Things Are Either Partisan Opinions, Which Have Become Petrified And Meaningless, Hardened And Empty Of Life, Or Else They Are Just Clever Word-games, In Which One View Wins Today, And Tomorrow The Opposite View. Works Of Art Are Of An Infinite Solitude, And No Means Of Approach Is So Useless As Criticism.

Never Has Grief Been Possessed, Never Has Love Been Learned, And What Removes Us In Death Is Not Revealed.

It Is So Often On The Name Of A Misdeed That A Life Goes To Pieces, Not The Nameless And Personal Action Itself, Which Was Perhaps A Perfectly Definite Necessity Of That Life And Would Have Been Absorbed By It Without Effort.

The Future Must Enter You Long Before It Happens.

For Poems Are Not, As People Think, Simply Emotions (one Has Emotions Early Enough)-they Are Experiences.

How Can I Keep My Soul In Me, So That It Doesn't Touch Your Soul? How Can I Raise It High Enough, Past You, To Other Things?

I Am So Afraid Of People's Words.they Describe So Distinctly Everything: And This They Call Dog And That They Call House, Here The Start And There The End. I Worry About Their Mockery With Words, They Know Everything, What Will Be, What Was; No Mountain Is Still Miraculous; And Their House And Yard Lead Right Up To God. I Want To Warn And Object: Let The Things Be! I Enjoy Listening To The Sound They Are Making. But You Always Touch: And They Hush And Stand Still. That's How You Kill.

Love And Death Are The Great Gifts That Are Given To Us; Mostly They Are Passed On Unopened.

Perhaps Somewhere, Someplace Deep Inside Your Being, You Have Undergone Important Changes While You Were Sad.

What We Fight With Is So Small, And When We Win, It Makes Us Small. What We Want Is To Be Defeated, Decisively, By Successively Greater Things

This Is What The Things Can Teach Us: To Fall, Patiently To Trust Our Heaviness. Even A Bird Has To Do That Before He Can Fly.

Do You Remember How Life Yearned Out Of Childhood Toward The "great Thing?" I See That It Is Now Yearning Forth Beyond The Great Thing Toward The Greater One.

So You Mustn't Be Frightened, Dear Mr. Kappus, If A Sadness Rises In Front Of You, Larger Than Any You Have Ever Seen; If An Anxiety - Like Light And Cloud-shadows, Moves Over Your Hands And Everything You Do. You Must Realize That Something Is Happening To You, That Life Has Not Forgotten You, That It Holds You In The Palm Of Its Hand And Will Not Let You Fall.

To Be Loved Means To Be Consumed. To Love Is To Give Light With Inexhaustible Oil. To Be Loved Is To Pass Away, To Love Is To Endure.

So It's Back Once More, Back Up The Slope. Why Do They Always Ruin My Rope With Their Cuts? I Felt So Ready The Other Day, Had A Real Foretaste Of Eternity In My Guts. Spoonfeeding Me Yet Another Sip From 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 Least I'm Keeping A Diet.

Draw Near To Nature. Then Try Like Some First Human Being To Say What You See And Experience And Love And Lose.

Perhaps All The Dragons In Our Lives Are Princesses Who Are Only Waiting To See Us Act, Just Once, With Beauty And Courage. Perhaps Everything That Frightens Us Is, In Its Deepest Essence, Something Helpless That Wants Our Love.

Music: Breathing Of Statues. Perhaps: Silence Of Paintings. You Language Where All Language Ends. You Time Standing Vertically On The Motion Of Mortal Hearts.

It Seems To Me That The Only Way One Can Be Helpful Is To Extend One's Hand To Someone Else Involuntarily, And Without Ever Knowing How Useful This Will Be.

You Must Think That Something Is Happening Upon You, That Life Has Not Forgotten You, That It Holds You In Its Hand; It Will Not Let You Fall.

With Poems One Accomplishes So Little When One Writes Them Early. One Should Hold Off And Gather Sense And Sweetness A Whole Life Long, A Long Life If Possible, And Then, Right At The End, One Could Perhaps Write Ten Lines That Are Good.

Live Your Questions Now, And Perhaps Even Without Knowing It, You Will Live Along Some Distant Day Into Your Answers.

Yet Everything That Touches Us, Me And You, Takes Us Together Like A Violin's Bow, Which Draws One Voice Out Of Two Separate Strings.

They, Who Passed Away Long Ago, Still Exist In Us, As Predisposition, As Burden Upon Our Fate, As Murmuring Blood, And As Gesture That Rises Up From The Depths Of Time.

Oh Longing For Places That Were Not Cherished Enough In That Fleeting Hour How I Long To Make Good From Afar The Forgotten Gesture, The Additional Act.

I Live My Life In Widening Circles That Reach Out Across The World.

Were It Possible For Us To See Further Than Our Knowledge Reaches, And Yet A Little Way Beyond The Outworks Of Our Divinings, Perhaps We Would Endure Our Sadnesses With Greater Confidence Than Our Joys. For They Are The Moments When Something New Has Entered Into Us, Something Unknown; Our Feelings Grow Mute In Shy Perplexity, Everything In Us Withdraws, A Stillness Comes, And The New, Which No One Knows, Stands In The Midst Of It And Is Silent.

Do Not Allow Yourself To Be Misled By The Surfaces Of Things

Everything Terrible Is Something That Needs Our Love.

There Are So Many Things About Which Some Old Man Ought To Tell One While One Is Little; For When One Is Grown One Would Know Them As A Matter Of Course.

Love Is Like The Measles. The Older You Get It, The Worse The Attack.

We See The Brightness Of A New Page Where Everything Yet Can Happen.

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Gil Scott-Heron

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