The Floating Library

Oh when, when, when will we ever have enough
of whining and defining? Haven’t champions
in the weaving of words been here already?
Why keep on trying?

Are not people perpetually, over and over and over again,
assaulted by books as by buzzing alarms?
When, between two books, the quieting sky appears,
or merely a patch of earth at evening –
rejoice . . .

Louder than all the storms, louder than all the oceans,
people have been crying out:
What abundance of quietude
the Universe must yield, if we screaming humans
can hear the crickets, and if the stars
in the screamed-at ether
can appease our hearts!

Let the farthest, oldest, most ancient
ancestors speak to us!
And let us be listeners at last, humans
finally able to hear.

– Rilke, Uncollected Poems

Old and enormous are the stars.
Old and small is the heart, and it
Holds more than all the stars, being,
Without space, greater than the vast expanse.

– From Fernando Pessoa’s Ruba’iyat, in the manner of Omar Khayyam

Exposed upon the mountains of the heart. See how small over there
the last outpost of words, and higher up,
just as small, one last farmyard of feeling.
Do you recognize it? Exposed
upon the mountains of the heart. Stony ground
under the hands.

Something still blooms here, on the dumb cliff face
blooms an unconscious weed, singing.
But where is the conscious one? He who began to be conscious
now is silent, exposed upon the mountains of the heart. . . .

– Rilke, Uncollected Poems

God will not let himself be lived like an easy morning.
Whoever enters that mineshaft
leaves wide-open earth behind,
crouches in tunnels to break Him loose.

– Rilke, Uncollected Poems

Things are not nearly so comprehensible and sayable as we are generally made to believe. Most experiences are unsayable; they come to fullness in a realm that words do not inhabit. And most unsayable of all are works of art, which — alongside our transient lives — mysteriously endure.

– Rilke, Paris, February 17, 1903
Letters to a Young Poet

What can enclose
this ample innerness?
So soft is this touch,
it could soothe any wound.
What skies are reflected
on the inland lake
of these open roses,
these untroubled ones?
See how loose they lie,
as if an abrupt gesture
would not scatter them.
They barely keep their shape.
They fill to overflowing
with inner space, spilling out
into days that swell
and close around them
until the whole summer becomes a room,
a room in a dream.

– Rilke, New Poems

I put down the cup of tea and examine my own mind. It alone can discover the truth. But how? What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark region through which it must go seeking and where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not exist yet, which it alone can make actual, which it alone can bring into the light of day.

– Proust

On the street full of boxes, the loaders are cleaning the street. One by one, with laughter and wisecracks, they are putting the boxes on the trucks. From the vantage point of my office window I watch them with slow eyes on which the lids are sleeping. And anything subtle, incomprehensible, ties what I feel to the shipments I see being made up; any unknown sensation makes a box out of all this tedium of mine, or anguish, or nausea, and carries it on the shoulders of a joking man to a truck that is not here.

– Bernardo Soares (Fernando Pessoa), The Book of Disquiet

You, God, who live next door:
If at times, through the long night, I trouble you
with my urgent knocking –
this is why: I hear you breathe so seldom.
I know you’re all alone in that room.
If you should be thirsty, there’s no one
to get you a glass of water.
I wait listening, always. Just give me a sign!
I’m right here.

As it happens, the wall between us
is very thin. Why couldn’t a cry
from one of us
break it down? It would crumble
easily,
it would barely make a sound.

– Rilke, The Book of Hours I, 6

It is all about praising.
Created to praise, his heart
is a winepress destined to break,
that makes for us an eternal wine.

His voice never chokes with dust
when words for the sacred come through.
All becomes vineyard. All becomes grape,
ripening in the southland of his being.

Nothing, not even the rot
in royal tombs, or the shadow cast by a god,
gives the lie to his praising.

He is ever the messenger,
venturing far through the doors of the dead,
bearing a bowl of fresh-picked fruit.

– Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus I, 7

In the last analysis, I have a completely indescribable passion for experiencing God, and this God is unquestionably closer to that of the Old Testament than He is to the Messiah’s Gospels. I must admit that what I have most wanted in life has been to discover within myself a temple to earth, and to dwell therein.

– Rilke, Letter to Rudolf Zimmerman
March 10, 1922