For others the time-abolishing joys of disinterested speculation. I only think, if that is the name for this vertiginous panic as of hornets smoked out of their nest, once a certain degree of terror has been exceeded.

They hope things will change one day, it’s natural. That one day on my windpipe, or some other section of the conduit, a nice little abscess will form, with in idea inside, point of departure for a general infection. This would enable me to jubilate like a normal person, knowing why. And in no time I’d be a network of fistulae, bubbling with the blessed pus of reason.

— Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable

But space hemmed him in on every side and held him in its toils, with the multitude of other faintly stirring, faintly struggling things, such as the children, the lodges and the gates, and like a sweat of things the moments streamed away in a great chaotic conflux of oozings and torrents, and the trapped huddled things changed and died each one according to its solitude.

. . . . Little by little the haze formed again, and the sense of absence, and the captive things began to murmur again, each one to itself, and it was as if nothing had ever happened or would ever happen again.

— Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies

The tendency of people to be fearful of those experiences they call apparitions or assign to the “spirit world,” including death, has done infinite harm to life. All these things so naturally related to us have been driven away through our daily resistance to them, to the point where our capacity to sense them has atrophied. To say nothing of God. Fear of the unexplainable has not only impoverished our inner lives, but also diminished relations between people; these have been dragged, so to speak, from the river of infinite possibilities and stuck on the dry bank where nothing happens. For it is not only sluggishness that makes human relations so unspeakably monotonous, it is the aversion to any new, unforeseen experience we are not sure we can handle.

— Rilke, Borgeby gärd, Sweden, August 12, 1904
Letters to a Young Poet

At the ball, Marcel Proust sat down in front of me on a little gilded chair, as if coming out of a dream, with his fur-lined cloak, his face full of sadness, and his night-seeing eyes.

— Marthe Bibesco

When you feel no commonality between yourself and other people, try to be close to Things, which will not abandon you. Nights are still there and winds that blow through the trees and over many lands. Amidst the things and beings of this world so much is happening that you can take part in. And children are still the way you were as a child, that happy and that sad, and when you think of your childhood you live it again with them, the lonely childhood, and grown-ups count for nothing.

— Rilke, Rome, December 23, 1903
Letters to a Young Poet

May what I do flow from me like a river,
no forcing and no holding back,
the way it is with children.

Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,
these deepening tides moving out, returning,
I will sing you as no one ever has,
streaming through widening channels
into the open sea.

— Rilke, From The Book of Hours I, 12

Why, then, do we have to be human
and keep running from the fate
we long for?

Oh, not because of such a thing as happiness —
that fleeting gift before loss begins.
Not from curiosity, or to exercise the heart. . . .
But because simply to be here is so much
and because what is here seems to need us,
this vanishing world that concerns us strangely —
us, the most vanishing of all. Once
for each, only once. Once and no more.
And we too: just once. Never again. But
to have lived even once,
to have been of Earth — that cannot be taken from us.

— Rilke, From the Ninth Duino Elegy

And I hear also, there we are at last, I hear a choir, far enough away for me not to hear it when it goes soft. It is a song I know, I don’t know how, and when it fades, and when it dies quite away, it goes on inside me, but too slow, or too fast, for when it comes on the air to me again it is not together with mine, but behind, or ahead. It is a mixed choir, or I am greatly deceived. With children too perhaps. I have the absurd feeling it is conducted by a woman. It has been singing the same song for a long time now. They must be rehearsing. It belongs already to the long past, it has uttered for the last time the triumphal cry on which it ends. Can it be Easter Week? Thus with the year seasons return. If it can, could not this song I have just heard, and which quite frankly is not yet quite stilled within me, could not this song have simply been to the honour and glory of him who was the first to rise from the dead, to him who saved me, twenty centuries in advance? Did I say the first? The final bawl lends colour to this view.

— Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies

This is what the things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.

— Rilke, From The Book of Hours II, 16

Don’t be confused by the nature of solitude, when something inside you wants to break free of your loneliness. This very wish, when you use it as a tool for understanding, can illumine your solitude and expand it to include all that is. Bound by conventions, people tend to reach for what is easy. It is clear, however, that here we must be unafraid of what is difficult. For all living things in nature must unfold in their particular way and become themselves at any cost and despite all opposition.

— Rilke, Rome, May 14, 1904
Letters to a Young Poet

I would not think to touch the sky with two arms

Live and invent. I have tried. I must have tried. Invent. It is not the word. Neither is live. No matter. I have tried. While within me the wild beast of earnestness padded up and down, roaring, ravening, rending. I have done that.

— Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies

I come home from the soaring
in which I lost myself.
I was song, and the refrain which is God
is still roaring in my ears.

Now I am still
and plain:
no more words.

— Rilke, From The Book of Hours I, 50

Full round apple, peach, pear, blackberry.
Each speaks life and death
into the mouth. Look
at the face of a child eating them.

The tastes come from afar
and slowly grow nameless on the tongue.
Where there where words, discoveries flow,
released from within the fruit.

What we call apple — dare to say what it is,
this sweetness which first condensed itself
so that, in the tasting, it may burst forth

and be known in all its meanings
of sun and earth and here.
How immense, the act and the pleasure of it.

— Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus I, 33

Who knows: eyes may be watching us
from all sides. Ah, only stumbling toward you
am I no longer on display. Growing into you,
I am forever set invisibly
in the darkening shelter of your heart.

— Rilke, Uncollected Poems