Category Archives: rilke

Writing now means somehow prevailing over oneself, for what to write when everything one touches is unspeakable, unrecognizable, when nothing belongs to one, no feeling, no hope.

Rilke

Writing now means somehow prevailing over oneself, for what to write when everything one touches is unspeakable, unrecognizable, when nothing belongs to one, no feeling, no hope; when an enormous provision, got I know not where, of suffering, despair, sacrifice and misery is used up in large amounts, as though everybody were somewhere in the whole mass, and the single person nowhere; nowhere any longer is the measure of the individual heart applicable which used to be the unit of the earth and the heavens and all expanses and abysses.

— Rilke, letter (via here)

Now, from America, empty indifferent things are pouring across, sham things, dummy life…. A house, in the American sense, an American apple or a grapevine over there, has nothing in common with the house, the fruit, the grape into which went the hopes and reflections of our forefathers … Live things, things that are alive — that are conscious of us — are running out and can no longer be replaced. We are perhaps the last to have known such things.

–- Rilke (via here)

Mirrors: no one has ever known how
to describe what you are in your inmost realm.
as if filled with nothing but sieve-holes, you
fathomless in-between spaces of time.

— Rilke, from Sonnets to Orpheus, II, 3 (tr. S. Mitchell)

True art can issue only from a purely anonymous centre.

— Rilke, letter