The Floating Library

It’s less true of other art forms, but for some reason with writers in particular we want to know where to stick them, where to shelve them. There’s a general tendency in the world to force people to assume positions that are much more rigid than what comes naturally to them. Once you make what [...]

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Loneliness is like the rain.
It rises from the sea toward evening
and from distant plains moves into sky
where it ever belongs.
And from the sky it falls upon us in the city.
It rains here below in the twilight hours
when alleyways wind toward morning
and when lovers, finding nothing,
leave the failure of each other’s arms,
and when two who loathe [...]

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Each of us has a name
given by God and given by our parents
Each of us has a name
given by our stature and given by what we wear
Each of us has a name
given by the mountains and given by our walls
Each of us has a name
given by the stars and given by our neighbors
Each of us [...]

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Just imagine: what for you now is sky and wind,
air to breathe and light to see,
becomes stone right up to the little space
made by my heart and hands.
And what you now call tomorrow and
soon and next year and after that –
becomes an open wound, full of pus.
It festers and never drains.
And what has been
becomes a [...]

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My hand has one gesture left:
to push things away.
From the rock dampness drips
on old stones.
This dripping is all I can hear.
My heart keeps pace
with the drops falling
and sinks away with them.
If the drops fell faster
an animal might come to drink.
Somewhere it is brighter than this –
but what do we know.
–Rilke, New Poems

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Allow your judgments their own undisturbed development, which like any unfolding, must come from within and can by nothing be forced or hastened. Everything is gestation and then birth. To allow each impression and each embryo of a feeling to complete itself in the dark, in the unsayable, the not-knowing, beyond the reach of one’s [...]

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HISTORY OF AN ERROR

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The real world, attainable to the wise, the pious, the virtuous man — he dwells in it, he is it.
(Oldest convincing form of the idea, relatively sensible, simple, convincing. Transcription of the proposition ‘I, Plato, am the truth.’)
The real world, unattainable for the moment, but promised to the wise, the pious, the [...]

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I’m living just as the century ends.
A great leaf, that God and you and I
have covered with writing
turns now, overhead, in strange hands.
We feel the sweep of it like a wind.
We see the brightness of a new page
where everything yet can happen.
Unmoved by us, the fates take its measure
and look at one another, saying nothing.
– [...]

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Again the murmur of my own deep life grows stronger,
flowing along wider shores.
Things grow ever more related to me,
and I see farther into their forms.
I become more trustful of the nameless.
My mind, like a bird,
rises from the oak tree into the wind,
and my heart sinks through the pond’s reflected day
to where the fishes move.
– Rilke, [...]

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Ever turned toward what we create, we see in it
only reflections of the Open, darkened by us.
Except when an animal silently looks us through and through.
This is our fate: to stand
in our own way. Forever
in the way.
– Rilke, From the Eighth Duino Elegy

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To love does not mean to surrender, dissolve, and merge with another person. It is the noble opportunity for an individual to ripen, to become something in and of himself. To become a world in response to another is a great immodest challenge that has sought him out and called him forth.
– Rilke, Rome, May [...]

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If we imagine our being as a room of any size, it seems that most of us know only a single corner of that room, a spot by the window, a narrow strip on which we keep walking back and forth. That gives a kind of security. But isn’t insecurity with all its dangers so [...]

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