I know that your profession is difficult and contrary to your nature. I cannot remove your distress; I can only urge you to consider whether all occupations are not challenging and hostile in some measure to one’s individuality, and saturated with the resentments of those who grimly and sullenly pursue them from duty only. The situation in which you must live now is not more burdened with conventions, prejudices, and errors than any other — and even if some occupation appears to offer greater freedom, it is a rare person who is able to stay open to the great matters that shape authentic living. Only the person who accepts solitude can place himself under the deep laws of the universe. When he steps into the fresh morning or out into the event-filled evening, all that is not him falls away, as if he had died, although he stands in the teeming midst of life.

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

There’s a point of poverty at which the spirit isn’t with the body all the time. It finds the body really too unbearable. So it’s almost as if you were talking to the soul itself. And a soul’s not properly responsible.

— Louis-Ferdinand Celine

The profession of letters is, after all, the only one in which one can make no money without being ridiculous.

— Jules Renard

In April 1943, Le Petit Prince was published in New York, a year before Antoine Saint-Exupéry was shot down over the Mediterranean by German reconnaissance planes. The English translation, by Katherine Woods, was copyrighted the same year . . . .

As in the case of contemporaries like Mann and Gide (the latter a great admirer of Saint-Exupéry), new versions of “canonical” translations raise questions (or at least suspicions) of lèse-majesté. A second translator into English of The Little Prince accepts the responsibility of such an imputation, for it must be acknowledged that all translations date; certain works never do. A new version of a work fifty-seven years old is entitled to and, indeed, is obliged to persist further in the letter of that work. Each decade has its circumlocutions, its compliances; the translator seeks these out, as we see in Ms. Woods’s pioneer endeavors, falls back on period makeshifts rather than confronting the often radical outrage of what the author, in his incomparable originality, ventures to say. The translator, it is seen in the fullness of time, so rarely ventures in this fashion, but rather falls back, as I say. It is the peculiar privilege of the next translator, in his own day and age, to sally forth, to be inordinate instead of placating or merely plausible. Time reveals all translation to be paraphrase, and it is in the longing for a standard version of a “beloved” work that we must begin again, we translators — that we must overtake one another.

— Richard Howard,
June 2000

To take things seriously — as my books are said to do — betokens no heaviness of spirit. Taking things seriously is no more than according things their true weight and seeing their innate value. It springs from a desire to weigh things on the scale of the heart rather than indulging in suspicion and distrust.

— Rilke, Letter to Rudolf Bodlander
March 13, 1922

<Today one of the brothers asked me: Is it a terrible prison, not to be able to move from the place where you’re standing?>
.<You answered . . .>
.<I told him that I am now more free than he is. The inability to move frees me from the obligation to act.>
.<You who speak languages, you are such liars.>

— Orson Scott Card, Xenocide

I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.

I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I’ve been circling for thousands of years
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?

— Rilke, The Book of Hours I, 2

Be near me when my light is low,

.
Be near me when the sensuous frame

.
Be near me when my faith is dry,

.
Be near me when I fade away,

.

— Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam, Verse L

True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written; in writing what deserves to be read.

— Pliny the Elder

Tell me, Orpheus, what offering I can make
to you, who taught the creatures how to listen?
I remember a spring day in Russia;
it was evening, and a horse . . .

He came up from the village, a gray horse, alone.
With a hobble attached to one leg
he headed to the fields for the night.
How the thick mane beat against his neck

in rhythm with his high spirits
and his impeded, lurching gallop.
How all that was horse in him quickened.

He embraced the distances as if he could sing them,
as if your songs were completed in him.
His image is my offering.

— Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus I, 20

This is what he had ordered from the painters’ guild.
It’s not that the savior himself had appeared to him,
or even that one single bishop
ever stood beside him, as depicted here,
gently laying his hand upon him.

But this, perhaps, was all he wanted:
to kneel like this.
He had known the desire to kneel,
to hold his own outward thrusting
tightly in his heart,
the way one grasps the reins of horses.

So that when the Immense might happen,
unpromised and unpaid for,
we might hope that it wouldn’t notice us
and thus, undistracted, deeply centered,
it would come closer, would come right up to us.

— Rilke, New Poems

Impermanence plunges us into the depth of all Being. And so all forms of the present are not to be taken and bound in time, but held in a larger context of meaning in which we participate. I don’t mean this in a Christian sense (from which I ever more passionately distance myself) but in a sheer earthly, deep earthly, sacred earthly consciousness: that what we see here and now is to bring us into a wider — indeed, the very widest — dimension. Not in an afterlife whose shadow darkens the earth, but in a whole that is the whole.

— Rilke, Letter to Witold Hulewicz
November 13, 1925

The biggest defeat in every department of life is to forget, especially the things that have done you in, and to die without realizing how far people can go in the way of crumminess. When the grave lies open before us, let’s not try to be witty, but on the other hand, let’s not forget, but make it our business to record the worst of the human viciousness we’ve seen without changing one word. When that’s done, we can curl up our toes and sink into the pit. That’s work enough for one lifetime.

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

Does Time, as it passes, really destroy?
It may rip the fortress from its rock;
but can this heart, that belongs to God,
be torn from Him by circumstances?

Are we as fearfully fragile
as Fate would have us believe?
Can we ever be severed
from childhood’s deep promise?

Ah, the knowledge of impermanence
that haunts our days
is their very fragrance.

We in our striving think we should last forever,
but could we be used by the Divine
if we were not ephemeral?

— Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus II, 27