R. M. Rilke: Letter
to a young poet
From:
R. M. Rilke, Letters to a young poet,
tr. by Stephen Mitchell
Page 15
Rilke : We
don't know ourselves!
From
Rilke's Elegies of Duino, The Fourth Elegy, tr. by
A. E. Flemming
And you,
my parents, am I not right? You who loved me
for that small beginning of my love for you
from which I always shyly turned away, because the distance in your features
grew, changed,
even while I loved it, into cosmic space where you no longer were...: and when
I feel
inclined to wait before the puppet stage, no,
rather to stare at is so intensely that in the end
to counter-balance my searching gaze, an angel
has to come as an actor, and begin manipulating the lifeless bodies of the
puppets to perform.
Angel
and puppet! Now at last there is a play!
Then
what we seperate can come together by our
very presence. And only then the entire cycle of our own life-seasons is
revealed and set in motion.
Above,
beyond us, the angel plays. Look:
must not
the dying notice how unreal, how full
of pretense is all that we accomplish here, where
nothing is to be itself. O hours of childhood,
when behind each shape more that the past lay hidden, when that which lay
before us was not the future.
We grew,
of course, and sometimes were impatient
in growing up, half for the sake
of pleasing those with nothing left but their own grown-upness.
Yet,
when alone, we entertained ourselves
with what alone endures, we would stand there in the infinite space that spans
the world and toys,
upon a place, which from the first beginnniing had been prepared to serve a
pure event.
Who
shows a child just as it stands? Who places him
within his constellation, with the measuring-rod
of distance in his hand. Who makes his death from gray bread that grows hard,
-or leaves it there inside his rounded mouth, jagged as the core of a
sweet apple?.......The minds of murderers
are easily comprehended. But this: to contain death,
the whole of death, even before life has begun, to hold it all so gently within
oneself,
and not be angry: that is indescribable.
Rilke wrote his first letter to a young poet (the original
title is "Briefe an einen jungen Dichter") in the February
of 1903 and the last one in the December of 1908. He had already
written the "Book of Images". Read
more... Cf. Plato, Books
can be your worst enemies *
Jaspers, Truth is in
communication *
Kierkegaard, My work as an author
*
Emerson, Reading and writing as
self-knowledge *
Francis Bacon, Reading & writing as
moral activities *
Tom Schulman, Dead Poets
Society
*
Gibson - MacRury, The man without a face
*
J. M. Lefévre, The White Thinking
*
Dostoevsky, The dream of ridiculous
man
