Friday, September 7, 2012

Rilke answers...



“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

~ Rainer Maria Rilke


Rilke has always made things a tad easy, breathable. Like the lucid laugh of a child. Like the gentle unfurling of a touch-me-not. Like that unnoticed fall of the last, rusting leaf. Expectations will nag, questions will pester, and yet life shall continue to unfold and happen. Day after day, year after year. Like it always has. 
For, to borrow the great poet once again to my rescue - "no feeling is final."

A very happy and happening weekend to you all. 


11 comments:

  1. Hello Suman:
    Your quotation here from Rilke is most thought provoking, as one might expect from this rather unusual German poet. And one wonders what he would write in today's very changed world since his death some eighty or more years ago.

    Equally, your own comment leaves us much to consider.

    Kellemes hétvégét.

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    1. Hello Jane and Lance, thank you for that lovely comment. Rilke does compel one to just sit back and think, think hard. I, for one, often get transported to another world by the two R's - Rilke and Rumi.

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  2. Contrary to you I don't find Rilke at all easy and I read him in the original German! His poems fill me with awe and deep emotion but his writings make me think and think without ever getting to the end of them.

    No feeling is final, perhaps I too will understand one day.

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    1. Dear Friko, we have that in common - to go on thinking after reading Rilke. The easiness that I mention here is not his poetry but what it does to the nagging doubts and hopelessness that haunt the reader. Most of mine melt away into that thinking tank!

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  3. Hello Suman

    How coincidental to see this post today. I was reading "Rilke's Book of Hours" this afternoon, which waiting for an appointment.
    It is a beautiful thought that no feeling is final.

    Have a wonderful weekend

    Helen xx

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    1. Hello Helen, lovely coincidence indeed! I am always in awe of how Rilke conveys the banalities of life in such a straightforward yet brimming with emotions manner. A very, very inspiring man he is.

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  4. I have always loved that Rilke quote, and I love all of Rilke.

    Friko — Perhaps Suman means, not that Rilke is always easy to understand intellectually, but that reading him just makes you instinctively and emotionally feel that he's right, and that he has a direct connection with your heart (and lungs!) Re. this quotation, just to realise another human being may happily live the questions without too much conscious troubling about the answers — may accept, live everything, just "be" — makes me breathe more easily, to be sure.

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    1. Hello Robert, glad to meet another Rilke lover! Thank you for that lovely explanation, I couldn't have said it half as beautifully as you. Agree, he does have a direct connection with the heart, one which further creeps into the mind and just refuses to go for a while.

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    2. Yes Robert, and Suman too, Rilke leaves you feeling refreshed and, at the same time, deeply stirred. I have not learned to 'just be', but that is my failing, not Rilke's. Rilke delves deep into the human spirit and his insight is almost mystical. No, forget the almost, mystical is right.

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  5. Great post. No feeling is final !! I love this quote. It's so true. We have to remember this!

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    1. Specially, we Virgos! I know you'll agree. :-)

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