Rainer Maria Rilke
Rainer Maria Rilke
René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke—better known as Rainer Maria Rilke—was a Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist, "widely recognized as one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets", writing in both verse and highly lyrical prose. Several critics have described Rilke's work as inherently "mystical". His writings include one novel, several collections of poetry, and several volumes of correspondence in which he invokes haunting images that focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief,...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth4 December 1875
CountryGermany
Do not, do not, do not books for ever hammer at people like perpetual bells? When, between two books, silent sky appears: be glad
That’s love: Two lonely persons keep each other safe and touch each other and talk to each other.
Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and great each other.
All companionship can consist in only the strengthening of neighboring solitudes, giving oneself is by nature harmful to companionship: for when a person abandons himself, he is no longer anything, and when two people both give themselves up in order to become closer to each other, there is no longer any ground beneath them and their being together is a continual falling – I have learned over and over again, there is scarcely anything more difficult than to love one another.
I am the rest between two notes which are somehow always in discord.
Take your well-disciplined strengths, stretch them between the two great opposing poles, because inside human beings is where God learns.
I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each shall stand guard over the solitude of the other. For, if it lies in the nature of indifference and of the crowd to recognize no solitude, then love and friendship are there for the purpose of continually providing the opportunity for solitude. And only those are the true sharings which rhythmically interrupt periods of deep isolation.
A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development.
Yet everything that touches us, me and you, takes us together like a violin's bow, which draws one voice out of two separate strings.
These soft nights hold me like themselves aloft and I lie without a lover.
...perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.
Who if I cried out, would hear me among the angel's hierarchies?and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:I would be consumed in that overwhelming existenceFor beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are still just able to endure.and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Whoever you are: some evening take a step out of your house, which you know so well. Enormous space is near.
I'm so glad you're here. . .it helps me realize how beautiful my world is.