If your daily life seems of no account, don’t blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its treasures. For the creative artist there is no impoverishment and no worthless place.
— Rilke, Paris, February 17, 1903
Letters to a Young Poet
God, every night is hard.
Always there are some awake,
who turn, turn, and do not find you.
Don’t you hear them crying out
as they go farther and farther down?
Surely you hear them weep; for they are weeping.
I seek you, because they are passing
right by my door. Whom should I turn to,
if not the one whose darkness
is darker than night, the only one
who keeps vigil with no candle,
and is not afraid —
the deep one, whose being I trust,
for it breaks through the earth into trees,
and rises,
when I bow my head,
faint as fragrance
from the soil.
— Rilke, From The Book of Hours II, 3
Those who sense eternity are beyond all fear. They see in every night the place where day begins, and are consoled.
Fearlessness is necessary for summer to come. Spring can be troubled; to its blossoming, uneasiness is like a home. But fruits need the strength and calm of the sun. All must be ready to receive, with wide open gateways and substantial bridges.
A race that is born in fear comes as a stranger to the world and never finds its way home.
— Rilke, Early Journals
The lies we tell are like toys,
easy to break. Like gardens
where we play hide and seek,
and, in our excitement, make a sound
so people will know where to look.
You are the wind that catches our voice,
our own shadow grown longer.
You collection of lovely holes
in the sponge that we are.
— Rilke, Collected French Poems
I took off my coat and shoes, opened my trousers and got in between the sheets. It is lying down, in the warmth, in the gloom, that I best pierce the outer turmoil’s veil, discern my quarry, sense what course to follow, find peace in another’s ludicrous distress. Far from the world, its clamours, frenzies, bitterness and dingy light, I pass judgment on it and on those, like me, who are plunged in it beyond recall, and on him who has need of me to be delivered, who cannot deliver myself. All is dark, but with that simple darkness that follows like a balm upon the great dismemberings.
— Samuel Beckett, Molloy
Slowly evening takes on the garments
held for it by a line of ancient trees.
You look, and the world recedes from you.
Part of it moves heavenward, the rest falls away.
And you are left, belonging to neither fully,
not quite so dark as the silent house,
not quite so sure of eternity
as that shining now in the night sky, a point of light.
You are left, for reasons you can’t explain,
with a life that is anxious and huge,
so that, at times confined, at times expanding,
it becomes in you now stone, now star.
— Rilke, Book of Images
I have hymns you haven’t heard.
There is an upward soaring
in which I bend close.
You can barely distinguish me
from the things that kneel before me.
They are like sheep, they are grazing.
I am the shepherd on the brow of the hill.
When evening draws them home
I follow after, the dark bridge thudding,
and the vapor rising from their backs
hides my own homecoming.
— Rilke, The Book of Hours I, 40
My room and the vastness around it,
awake in the oncoming night,
are one. I am a string
stretched taut
across resonating distances.
All things are the body of the violin,
filled with murmuring darkness.
There, grieving women lie down to dream.
There the resentments of generations
surrender to sleep . . .
A silver thread,
I reverberate:
then all that’s underneath me
comes to life.
And what has lost its way
will, by my vibrant sounds,
be at last brought home
and allowed to fall endlessly
into the depthless source. . . .
— Rilke, Book of Images
And having heard, or more probably read somewhere, in the days when I thought I would be well advised to educate myself, or amuse myself, or stupefy myself, or kill time, that when a man in a forest thinks he is going forward in a straight line, in reality he is going in a circle, I did my best to go in a circle, hoping in this way to go in a straight line. For I stopped being half-witted and became sly, whenever I took the trouble. And my head was a storehouse of useful knowledge. And if I did not go in a vigorously straight line, with my system of going in a circle, at least I did not go in a circle, and that was something.
— Samuel Beckett, Molloy
Logic is a carpet laid over an abyss.
— O. B. Hardison Jr.
It can be put this way. If I allow all things to vanish, then according to Newton the Galilean inertial space remains; following my interpretation, however, nothing remains.
— Albert Einstein
Quite undeservedly, the ether has acquired a bad name.
— Frank Wilczek
The universe is made mostly of dark matter and dark energy, and we don’t know what either of them is.
— Saul Perlmutter
Time comes to an end in a black hole.
— Stephen Hawking
If there were not void, things could not move at all; for that which is the property of body, to let and hinder, would be present to all things at all times; nothing therefore could go on, since no other thing would be the first to give way.
— Lucretius
So Einstein was wrong when he said, “God does not play dice.” Consideration of black holes suggests, not only that God does play dice, but that he sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can’t be seen.
— Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose
The vacuum of modern particle theory is a strange place indeed. From an unchanging “void” it has become an active arena out of which particles might be created or into which they might be destroyed . . . The vacuum might even be the “source” of all matter in the universe.
— Lawrence M. Krauss
The vacuum is truly a ‘living Form Void,’ pulsating in endless rhythms of creation and destruction.
— Fritjof Capra
In the quantum realm, even nothing never sleeps. Nothing is always up to something. Even when there is absolutely nothing going on, and nothing there to do it.
— K. C. Cole
If you were to travel at the speed of light, it would take you several years to get to the nearest stars in our own Milky Way galaxy; but if you were to go to this hole and enter one side, you’d have to travel for a billion years before you would get to the other side.
— Lawrence Rudnick
True talk of Nothing always remains unfamiliar. It does not allow itself to be made common. It dissolves, to be sure, if one places it in the cheap acid of a merely logical cleverness.
— Martin Heidegger
Although atoms are way more than 99.99 percent empty space, I have a real problem in walking through a wall.
— Leon Lederman and Dick Teresi
The truth is that emptiness is the norm of the universe. It is almost void of matter.
— John Stewart Collis
The vacuum is a garbage dump. Einstein freed us from it, now we’ve got to get rid of it again. Some kid now in junior high school will tell us how.
— Leon Lederman
Whenever it looks like there is ‘nothing,’ there is never ‘nothing’ there; it’s just the beginning of something else about to happen.
— Jose Rodriguez, junior high school student
All the things you would do gladly, oh without enthusiasm, but gladly, all the things there seems no reason for your not doing, and that you do not do! Can it be we are not free? It might be worth looking into.
The fact is, it seems, that the most you can hope is to be a little less, in the end, the creature you were in the beginning, and the middle.
— Samuel Beckett, Molloy
Whenever people in love act out of an imagined fusion of their beings, their every action is dictated by convention. Every relation colored by such confusion is conventional, however exotic (that is, immoral) it might appear. Even separating would be a conventional step, an automatic alternative lacking in skill and creativity.
Whoever takes it seriously, discovers that, as with death which is real, so with real love, there are no easy recipes. For both these undertakings, there are no universally agreed-upon rules. But in the same measure that we begin as individuals to explore life’s meaning for us, these great things come toward us to be met and known. The claims made upon us by the hard work of love are bigger than life and essential to our unfolding, and we are seldom up to them at the outset. But if we hold steady and take this love upon us as a task and a teaching, instead of losing ourselves in an easy and frivolous game behind which to hide the most honest questions of our existence — this may be felt as a small illumination and step forward by those who come long after us. That in itself would be a lot.
— Rilke, Rome, May 14, 1904
Letters to a Young Poet
Then, in the mist, I saw a big man walking up the street. He was wearing one shoe. He had a familiar look, so I got out of my chair and went partway down the driveway, and I waved at him. It’s not unusual, really, for people to walk up and down my street without two shoes on at midnight. He stopped. He put his hand on the telephone poll that’s there. He looked down. And then he looked over to me. He was a big guy. Big strong bald head. Wide nose. Kind of a defiant, wild, defeated look. I said, “Ted? Ted Roethke? Is that you?” And he nodded slightly. I said, “Wow, Ted, how’s it going? You look like you just got hit with a couple hundred million volts of electricity.”
“No, it’s hydrotherapy,” he said. ” ‘I do not laugh, I do not cry; / I’m sweating out the will to die.’ ”
“Whoa, Ted,” I said. “Sounds a little like Dr. Seuss, except dark. You want to come in and maybe make a phone call to a loved one?”
He shook his head no. I went back to my chair and sat down. The mist came and went. In ten minutes, a car pulled up behind him, and a man got out and led him into the car, and they drove away.
I went inside, and I got in bed next to some anthologies and W. S. Merwin’s The Vixen and slept quite well.
— Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist
It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else. Here we are now.
— John Cage
For it was not so bad being in the forest, I could imagine worse, and I could have stayed there till I died, unrepining, yes, without pining for the light and the plain and the other amenities of my region. For I knew them well, the amenities of my region, and I considered that the forest was no worse. And it was not only no worse, to my mind, but it was better, in this sense, that I was there. That is a strange way, is it not, of looking at things. Perhaps less strange than it seems. For being in the forest, a place neither worse nor better than the others, and being free to stay there, was it not natural I should think highly of it, not because of what it was, but because I was there. For I was there. And being there I did not have to go there, and that was not to be despised . . . .
I longed to go back into the forest. Oh not a real longing. Molloy could stay, where he happened to be.
— Samuel Beckett, Molloy
Sometimes a man rises from the supper table
and goes outside. And he keeps going
because somewhere to the east there’s a church.
His children bless his name as if he were dead.
Another man stays at home until he dies,
stays with plates and glasses.
So then it is his children who go out
into the world, seeking the church that he forgot.
— Rilke, The Book of Hours II, 19
The Floating Library 