Rainer Maria Rilke, 1875-….
Have patience with everything that remain unsolved in your
heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like
locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language.
Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given
to you because you could not live them. It is a question
of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question.
Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it,
find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.
++
For one human being to love another: that is perhaps
the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the
last test and proof, the work for which all other work
is but preparation.
++
Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early
in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and
sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible,
and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to
write ten good lines, For poems are not,as people think,
simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)they are
experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see
many cities, many people and Things, you must understand
animals, must feel how birds fly,and know the gesture which
small flowers make when they open in the morning.
You must be able to think back to streets in unknown
neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings
you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose
mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to
hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn’t pick it up
(it was a joy meant for somebody else-);
to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many
profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet
restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea
itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushedalong high
overhead and went flying with allthe stars,
– and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that.
You must have memories of many nights of love, each one
different from all the others, memories of women screaming
in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just
given birth and are closing again. But you must also have
been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the
room with the open windows and the scattered noises.
And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able
to forget them when they are many, and you must have the
immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories
themselves are not important. Only when they have changed
into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are
nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves-
only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the
first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth
from them.