My God, my God, if nights like this lie ahead of me grant me at least one of the thoughts I’ve now and then been able to think. What I’m asking for now is not so unreasonable; for I know that they come directly from my fear because my fear was so great. When I was a boy they hit me in the face and told me what a coward I was. That was because I was still bad at being afraid. But since then I’ve learnt to be afraid with the real fear that only increases when the power to produce it increases. We can have no idea of this power except in our fear. For it’s so wholly incomprehensible, so completely opposed to us that our brain disintegrates at the point where we struggle to think about it. And yet, for a while now I have believed that it is our power, the whole of our power, that is too strong for us. It’s true that we don’t know it, but don’t we know least what is rightly our own? Sometimes I think about how heaven came to be, and how death; because we’ve distanced ourselves from what is most valuable to us, because there were so many other things to do first and because we were too busy to safeguard it. The passage of time has now obscured this, and we have grown accustomed to lesser things. We no longer recognise what is ours, and we are appalled by its sheer magnitude. Can that not be so?

— Rilke, Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (tr. Needham)