The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.

Do not assume that he who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, he would never have been able to find these words.

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.

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

Duino Elegies. Translated by Croggon, Alison. Melbourne: Newport Street Books. 2022. ISBN 9780648874430. OCLC 1312727462.

#rilke #poetry #germantoenglish #translation #germanlanguagepoetry #literarycanon

Duino Elegies: A New Translation and Commentary. Translated by Travers, Martin. Rochester: Boydell & Brewer. 2023. ISBN 9781640140981. OCLC 1369656958.

#rilke #poetry #germantoenglish #translation #germanlanguagepoetry #literarycanon

The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate.

And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside.

We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us long before it happens.

That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, - is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was.

Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing.

It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living.

Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final

“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves [ . . . ]”

excerpt from _Letters to a Young Poet_

"Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?"

"Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the hierarchies of angels?"

from _Duino Elegies_