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pickHard pick. This book was gifted to me by a dear friend and I thank them immensely for that. There are many valuable words of wisdom and comfort for any lost souls in search of answers. Beautiful, moving and ahead of his time in a way.
"And this more human love (which will fulfill itself with infinite consideration and gentleness, and kindness and clarity in binding and releasing) will resemble what we are now preparing painfully and with great struggle: the love that consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other."
"And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to move out of 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."
"(...)have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms (...). Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer"
"Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them."
"A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it. (...) go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which life flows; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create."
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.
