pickI read a chunk of this on Aug and Dec last year. Then picked it up Aug 1 to read the Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus. Rilke was a romantic at heart, trying to stress the moment, the contact with now, with nature, with its temporariness, with awareness of death. He also adores the mystery of mythology. Also he‘s often just out there. My reading spiked when I last picked this up, my 1st book every morning. I miss that motivation.
“If we picture the world‘s whole realm of experience, including all its areas that exceed us, as a complete circle, it is immediately obvious how much larger the dark sectors are, which stand for what we are incapable of experiencing, compared with the other arcs representing what is lit up by the searchlights of our senses.
Now the situation of someone in love is this: he feels himself suddenly placed in the center of the circle, that is to say👇
A Rilke quote for your morning, one that might require a pause for moment:
(On “The excited and endless cleverness of the age” empowering poets and poetry, 1913)
“And yet, who hasn‘t looked at it, at least for a moment, with distrust; asked himself if it is really concerned with fruitfulness, or only with a mechanically better and more exhaustive exploitation of the soul?”
My current book of poetry. I‘ve had this sitting around some 20 years now.
Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose | 
