Rainer Maria Rilke

“You have to live life to the limit, not according to each day but by plumbing its depth.” –RAINER MARIA RILKE In this treasury of uncommon wisdom and spiritual insight, the best writings and personal philosophies of one of the twentieth century’s greatest poets, Rainer Maria Rilke, are gleaned by Ulrich Baer from thousands of pages of never-before translated correspondence. The result is a profound vision of how the human drive to create and understand can guide us in every facet of life. Arranged by theme–from everyday existence with others to the exhilarations of love and the experience of loss, from dealing with adversity to the nature of inspiration, here are Rilke’s thoughts on how to live life in a meaningful way: Life and Living: “How good life is. How fair, how incorruptible, how impossible to deceive: not even by strength, not even by willpower, and not even by courage. How everything remains what it is and has only this choice: to come true, or to exaggerate and push too far.” Art: “The work of art is adjustment, balance, reassurance. It can be neither gloomy nor full of rosy hopes, for its essence consists of justice.” Faith: “I personally feel a greater affinity to all those religions in which the middleman is less essential or almost entirely suppressed.” Love: “To be loved means to be ablaze. To love is: to shine with inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to pass away; to love is to last.” Intimate, stylistically masterful, brilliantly translated, and brimming with the wonder and passion of Rilke, The Poet’s Guide to Life is comparable to the best works of wisdom in all of literature and a perfect book for all occasions.

The Wisdom of Rilke

The Poet's Guide to Life

maia

Wishes are the memories coming from our future! 

Be out of sync with your times for just one day, and you will see how much eternity you contain within you.

I have by now grown accustomed, to the degree that this is humanly possible, to grasp everything that we may encounter according to its particular intensity without worrying much about how long it will last. Ultimately, this may be the best and most direct way of expecting the utmost of everything—even its duration.

Is not everything that happens to us, whether or not we desire or solicitit, always glorious and full of the purest, clearest justice?

What else does it mean to live but precisely this daring undertaking of filling a mold that one day will be broken off one's new shoulders, so that, now free in this new metamorphosis, one may become acquainted with all the other beings that have been magically transported into the same realm?

Finally—we know this—life's little wisdom is to wait (but to wait in the proper, pure state of mind), and the great grace that is bestowed on us in return is to survive...

Is it not peculiar that nearly all of the great philosophers and psychologists have always paid attention to the earth and nothing but the earth? great Would it not be more sublime to lift our eyes from this crumb, and instead of considering a Our attention to space itself? Just imagine how small speck of dust in the universe, to turn and insignificant all earthly toils would suddenly appear at the moment when our earth would shrink to the tiniest, swirling, aimless particle of an infinite world! And how the human being would have to grow in size on his "small earth"!

I confess that I consider life to be a thing of the most untouchable deliciousness, and that even the confluence of so many disasters and deprivations, the exposure of countless fates, everything that insurmountably increased for us over the past few years to become a still rising terror cannot distract me from the fullness and goodness of existence that is inclined toward us. There would be little sense in approaching you with good wishes if each wish were not preceded by this conviction that the goods of life arise pure, undamaged, and, at their very bottom, desirable out of upheaval and ruin.

There is a single, deadly mnistake that we can make: to attach ourselves to another human being even if only for an instant.

Ultimately nobody can help anyone else in life; one has this recurring experience in every conflict and confusion: that one is alone.

Whatever is heavy and difficult, as long as it is only borne properly, also marks the precise weight of life. It teaches us the measure by which we may know our strength and which we may then also apply when we feel blessed with happiness.

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