“
I love the dark hours of my being
in which my senses drop into the deep.
I have found in them, as in old letters,
my private life, that is already lived through,
and become wide and powerful now, like legends.
Then I know that there is room in me
for a second huge and timeless life.
Rainer Maria Rilke, from
A Book for the Hours in Prayer, trans. Robert Bly (via
proustitute)
(via zuzulouise)
As a poet Rilke made his debut at the age of nineteen with LEBEN UND LIEDER (1894), written in the conventional style of Heinrich Heine. In Munich he met Lou Salomé, the talented and spiritied daughter of a Russian army officer, who was 14 years his senior. Salomé influenced him deeply; they become lovers in 1897. In Florence, where he spent some months in 1898, Rilke wrote: “… I felt at first so confused that I could scarcely separate my impressions, and thought I was drowning in the breaking waves of some foreign splendor.” Salomé had been a friend of Nietzsche, who broke off his relationship with Salomé in December 1882. Later she married professor Friedrich Carl Andreas. Other important women in Rilke’s life were the young sculptress Klara Westhoff, the Swedish writer Ellen Key, Marthe Hennebert, who was a young girl who become a textile designer, the great Italian actress Eleonora Duse, Marie von Thurn und Taxis, and Hertha Koenig, both very wealthy, and Nanny Wunderly-Volkart.
Source
Rainer Maria Rilke was born René Karl Wilhelm Johann Joseph Maria Rilke in Prague, the son of Josef Rilke, a railway official and the former Sophie Entz, the daughter of a bank official with the title of Imperial Counsellor. A crucial fact in Rilke’s life was that his mother called him Sophia and forced him to wear girl’s clothes until he was aged five - thus compensating for the earlier loss of a baby daughter. However, his father gave him toy soldiers and dumbbells for exercise. Later Rilke blamed his mother for his dark childhood, but she also encouraged him to read and write poetry. Rilke also learned early many of Schiller’s ballads by heart.
Source
I’m getting a Rilke tattoo
it’s a tree with the words “ripening like a tree, which doesn’t force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come” around the two sides of the bark with “it does come” in larger letters tangled in the roots. on the bark of the tree there is a heart with just the initials RMR in the middle.
I think I’m going to get it on the inside of my left forearm.
“
The future stands still, dear Mr. Kappus, but we move in infinite space.
- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“
People have already had to rethink so many concepts of motion; and they will also gradually come to realize that what we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us.
“
The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate; and later on, when it “happens” (that is, steps forth out of us to other people), we will feel related and close to it in our innermost being. And that is necessary.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“
We can’t say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside.
Rainer Maria Rilke
“
We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes.
- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“
Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, is already in our bloodstream. And we don’t know what it was.
- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“
If only it were possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches, and even a little beyond the outworks of our presentiment, perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing.
“
It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living.
- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“
Perhaps many things inside you have been transformed; perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad. The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of.
“
But if we nevertheless endure and take this love upon us as burden and apprenticeship, instead of losing ourselves in the whole easy and frivolous game behind which people have hidden from the most solemn solemnity of their being, then a small advance and a lightening will perhaps be perceptible to those who come long after us. That would be much.
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