Rilke on sadness
I think Rainer Maria Rilke have catched something in his "Letters to a young poet."
He wrote them just for a young and troubled man, but later on they have been collected in a small book.
Rilke was a genius and a romantic poet, in the best sense.
He needed a lot of solitude and moved from castle to castle to find some peace and inspiration.
He wrote one of his few books, The Duino Elegies, when he lived at the Duino castle, near the sea in Italy;
It starts with the words;
"Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the hierarchies of angels?"
He wrote this, words that suddenly came to him, in 1912. But the whole poem was not completed until 1922.
In a letter he explained that he hoped the poem to be a contribution for "to prepare in men's hearts the way for those gentle, mysterious, trembling transformations from which alone the understandings and harmonies of a serener future will proceed."
But how to reach this transformation?
In "Letters to a young poet" he gives a possible answer:
"The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate; and later on, when it "happens" (that is, steps forth out of us to other people), we will feel related and close to it in our innermost being. And that is necessary. It is necessary - and toward this point our development will move, little by little - that nothing alien happen to us, but only what has long been our own. People have already had to rethink so many concepts of motion; and they will also gradually come to realize that what we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us."
To be open to our suffering and unsatisfied ness can be a way to transform ourselves.
And that we can do in meditation; to look at our thoughts, without condemning them. Just to be aware of ourselves. Not running away from sadness.
I think Rilke thought that sadness was one of the reasons to word war one.
But sadness and suffering projected as hate to the "enemies". A way of running away from sadness which only creates more sadness,
He was lucky not to experience the WW2. It is said that what happened in that war makes it impossible to write poetry. Poetry anyway is very different in our "modern" age, at least in Europe.
But Rilkes letter to the young man brings some hope; perhaps we are part of a development that we cannot comprehend. We are surrounded by a kind of "angels". But to see their strange beauty would be a terrybly experience - would too much for us.
I think Rilke is one of us who are highly sensitive - and the WW2 would probably have destroyed his sensitive soul.
But by his books his soul is still living...
He wrote them just for a young and troubled man, but later on they have been collected in a small book.
Rilke was a genius and a romantic poet, in the best sense.
He needed a lot of solitude and moved from castle to castle to find some peace and inspiration.
He wrote one of his few books, The Duino Elegies, when he lived at the Duino castle, near the sea in Italy;
It starts with the words;
"Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the hierarchies of angels?"
He wrote this, words that suddenly came to him, in 1912. But the whole poem was not completed until 1922.
In a letter he explained that he hoped the poem to be a contribution for "to prepare in men's hearts the way for those gentle, mysterious, trembling transformations from which alone the understandings and harmonies of a serener future will proceed."
But how to reach this transformation?
In "Letters to a young poet" he gives a possible answer:
"The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate; and later on, when it "happens" (that is, steps forth out of us to other people), we will feel related and close to it in our innermost being. And that is necessary. It is necessary - and toward this point our development will move, little by little - that nothing alien happen to us, but only what has long been our own. People have already had to rethink so many concepts of motion; and they will also gradually come to realize that what we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us."
To be open to our suffering and unsatisfied ness can be a way to transform ourselves.
And that we can do in meditation; to look at our thoughts, without condemning them. Just to be aware of ourselves. Not running away from sadness.
I think Rilke thought that sadness was one of the reasons to word war one.
But sadness and suffering projected as hate to the "enemies". A way of running away from sadness which only creates more sadness,
He was lucky not to experience the WW2. It is said that what happened in that war makes it impossible to write poetry. Poetry anyway is very different in our "modern" age, at least in Europe.
But Rilkes letter to the young man brings some hope; perhaps we are part of a development that we cannot comprehend. We are surrounded by a kind of "angels". But to see their strange beauty would be a terrybly experience - would too much for us.
I think Rilke is one of us who are highly sensitive - and the WW2 would probably have destroyed his sensitive soul.
But by his books his soul is still living...
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