For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of our tasks: the ultimate, the last test and proof: the work for which all other work is but preparation.
—Rainer Maria Rilke (via nirvikalpa)
(via kyyal)
Posts tagged Rainer Maria Rilke:
Our task is to take this earth so deeply and wholly into ourselves that it will resurrect within our being.
—Rainer Maria Rilke (via journalofanobody)
(via elysskama)
“Who has not sat before his [or her] own heart’s curtain? It lifts: and the scenery is falling apart.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke
To Lou Andreas-Salome | Rainer Maria Rilke 
I
I held myself too open, I forgot
that outside not just things exist and animals
fully at ease in themselves, whose eyes
reach from their lives’ roundedness no differently
than portraits do from frames; forgot that I
with all I did incessantly crammed
looks into myself: looks, opinion, curiosity.
Who knows: perhaps eyes form in space
and look on everywhere. Ah, only plunged toward you
does my face cease being on display, grows
into you and twines on darkly,
endlessly, into your sheltered heart.II
As one puts a handkerchief before pent-in breath—
no: as one presses it against a wound
out of which the whole of life, in a single gush,
wants to scream, I held you to me: I saw
you turn red from me. How could anyone express
what took place between us? We made up for everything
there was never time for. I matured strangely
in every impulse of unperformed youth,
and you, love, somehow had
wildest childhood over my heart.III
Memory won’t suffice here: from those moments
there must be layers of pure existence
on my being’s floor, a precipitate
from that immensely overfilled solution.
For I don’t think back; all that I am
stirs me because of you. I don’t invent you
at sadly cooled-off places from which
you’ve gone away; even your not being there
is warm with you and more real and more
than a privation. Longing leads out too often
into vagueness. Why should I cast myself,
when, for all I know, your influence falls on me,
gently, like moonlight on a window seat.—Rainer Maria Rilke
In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.
And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, from Sonnets to Orpheus (translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)
(Source: awritersruminations)
![“Love is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become world, to become world for [one’s self] and for another’s sake; it is a great exacting claim upon him [or her], something that chooses him [or her] out and calls one to vast things.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Image: Rainer Maria Rilke with his lover, the painter Baladine Klossowska (Muzot, Switerland, 1923)](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3br5z5OgE1qe0r71o1_r1_500.jpg)
“Love is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become world, to become world for [one’s self] and for another’s sake; it is a great exacting claim upon him [or her], something that chooses him [or her] out and calls one to vast things.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Image: Rainer Maria Rilke with his lover, the painter Baladine Klossowska (Muzot, Switerland, 1923)
Again and Again, However We Know the Landscape of Love
Again and again, however we know the landscape of love
and the little churchyard there, with its sorrowing names,
and the frighteningly silent abyss into which the others
fall: again and again the two of us walk out together
under the ancient trees, lie down again and again
among the flowers, face to face with the sky.- Rainer Maria Rilke
(via elysskama)
Moving Forward
The deep parts of my life pour onward,
as if the river shores were opening out.
It seems that things are more like me now,
that I can see farther into paintings.
I feel closer to what language can’t reach.
With my senses, as with birds, I climb
Into the windy heaven, out of the oak,
And in the ponds broken off from the sky
My feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes.— Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Robert Bly
Rilke’s special gift as a poet is that he does not seem to speak from the middle of life, that he is always calling us away from it. His poems have the feeling of being written from a great depth in himself. What makes them so seductive is that they also speak to the reader so intimately. They seem whispered or crooned into our inmost ear, insinuating us toward the same depth in ourselves. The effect can be hypnotic….The voice of Rilke’s poems, calling us out of ourselves, or calling us into the deeper places in ourselves, is very near to what people mean by poetry.
—Robert Hass (via litverve)
(via awritersruminations)
Things aren’t all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.
——Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (Random House, 1984)(via electrichoney)
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