Rainer Maria Rilke

"Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies? And even if one of them pressed me against his heart: I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying. And so I hold myself back and swallow the call note of my dark sobbing. Ah, whom can we ever turn to in our need? Not angels, not humans, and already the knowing animals are aware that we are not really at home in our interpreted world.

Perhaps there remains for us some tree on a hillside, which every day we take into our vision; there remains for us yesterday's street and the loyalty of a habit so much at ease when it stayed with us that it moved in and never left.

Oh, and night: there is night, when a wind full of infinite space gnaws at our faces.
Whom would it not remain for -- that longed-after, mildly disillusioning presence, which the solitary heart so painfully meets?

Is it any less difficult for lovers? But they keep on using each other to hide their own fate. Don't you know yet? Fling the emptiness out of your arms into the spaces we breathe; perhaps the bird will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying.

Yes -- the springtimes needed you. Often a star was waiting for you to notice it.
A wave rolled toward you out of the distant past, or as you walked under an open window, a violin yielded itself to your hearing...

More and more in my life and in my work I am guided by the effort to correct our old repressions, which have removed and gradually estranged from us the mysteries out of whose abundance our lives might have become truly infinite. It is true that these mysteries are dreadful and people have always drawn away from them.

But where can we find anything sweet and glorious that would never wear the mask of the dreadful? Life -- and we know nothing else -- isn't life itself dreadful? But as soon as we acknowledge its dreadfulness (not as opponents: what kind of match could we be for it?), but somehow with a confidence that this very dreadfulness may be something completely ours, though something that is just now too great, too vast, too incomprehensible for our learning hearts -- as soon as we accept life's most terrifying dreadfulness, at the risk of perishing from it (i.e., from our own Too-much!) -- then an intuition of blessedness will open up for us
and, at this cost, will be ours.

Whoever does not, sometime or other, give his full consent, his full and JOYOUS consent to the dreadfulness of life, can never take possession of the unutterable abundance and power of our existence; can only walk on its edge, and one day, when the judgment is given, will have been neither alive nor dead. To show the IDENTITY of dreadfulness and bliss, these two faces of the same divine head, indeed this one SINGLE face, which just presents itself this way or that, according to our distance from it or the state of mind in which we perceive it -- this is the true significance and purpose of the Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus."


(To Countess Margot Siszo-Noris-Crouy, April 12, 1923)