MAY MINUTES
SEPT
/ OCT / NOV
/ DEC / JAN
/ FEB / MARCH
/ APRIL / MAY
May5
"Think, dear Sir, of the world that you carry inside you, and
call this thinking whatever you want to: a remembering of your own
childhood or a yearning toward a future of your own - only be attentive
to what is arising within you, and place that above everything you
perceive around you. What is happening in your innermost self is
worthy of your entire love; somehow you must find a way to work
at it, and not lose too much time or too much courage in clarifying
your attitude toward people. Who says that you have any attitude
at all? l know, your profession is hard and full of things that
contradict you, and I foresaw your lament and knew that it would
come. Now that it has come, there is nothing I can say to reassure
you, I can only suggest that perhaps all professions are like that,
filled with demands, filled with hostility toward the individual,
saturated as it were with the hatred of those who find themselves
mute and sullen in an insipid duty. The situation you must live
in now is not more heavily burdened with conventions, prejudices,
and false ideas than all the other situations, and if there are
some that pretend to offer a greater freedom, there is nevertheless
none that is, in itself, vast and spacious and connected to the
important Things that the truest kind of life consists of. Only
the individual who is solitary is placed under the deepest laws
like a Thing, and when he walks out into the rising dawn or looks
out into the event-filled evening and when he feels what is happening
there, all situations drop from him as if from a dead man, though
he stands in the midst of pure life. What you, dear Mr. Kappus,
now have to experience as an officer, you would have felt in just
the same way in any of the established professions; yes, even if,
outside any position, you had simply tried to find some easy and
independent contact with society, this feeling of being hemmed in
would not have been spared you. It is like this everywhere; but
that is no cause for anxiety or sadness; if there is nothing you
can share with other people, try to be close to Things; they will
not abandon you; and the nights are still there, and the winds that
move through the trees and across many lands; everything in the
world of Things and animals is still filled with happening, which
you can take part in; and children are still the way you were as
a child, sad and happy in just the same way and if you think of
your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary
children, and the grownups are nothing, and their dignity has no
value."
It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension,
which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished
emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence
that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to
is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst
of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the
sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has
been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber
and is no longer even there, is already in our bloodstream. And
we don't know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that
nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest
has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will
never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in
this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens.
And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive
when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless
moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than
that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to
us as if from outside. 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. It is only because so many people have not absorbed
and transformed their fates while they were living in them that
they have not realized what was emerging from them; it was so alien
to them that, in their confusion and fear, they thought it must
have entered them at the very moment they became aware of it, for
they swore they had never before found anything like that inside
them. just as people for a long time had a wrong idea about the
sun's motion, they are even now wrong about the motion of what is
to come. The future stands still, dear Mr. Kappus, but we move in
infinite space."........
TO TOP
"How could it not be difficult for us?
And to speak of solitude again, it becomes clearer and clearer
that fundamentally this is nothing that one can choose or refrain
from. We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act
as if it were not true. That is all. But how much better it is to
recognize that we are alone; yes, even to begin from this realization.
It will, of course, make us dizzy; for all points that our eyes
used to rest on are taken away from us, there is no longer anything
near us, and everything far away is infinitely far. A man taken
out of his room and, almost without preparation or transition, placed
on the heights of a great mountain range, would feel something like
that: an unequalled insecurity, an abandonment to the nameless,
would almost annihilate him. He would feel he was falling or think
he was being catapulted out into space or exploded into a thousand
pieces: what a colossal lie his brain would have to invent in order
to catch up with and explain the situation of his senses. That is
how all distances, all measures, change for the person who becomes
solitary; many of these changes occur suddenly and then, as with
the man on the mountaintop, unusual fantasies and strange feelings
arise, which seem to grow out beyond all that is bearable. But it
is necessary for us to experience that too. We must accept our reality
as vastly as we possibly can; everything, even the unprecedented,
must be possible within it. This is in the end the only kind of
courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest,
most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us. The
fact that people have in this sense been cowardly has done infinite
harm to life; the experiences that are called it apparitions, the
whole so-called "spirit world," death, all these Things
that are so closely related to us, have through our daily defensiveness
been so entirely pushed out of life that the senses with which we
might have been able to grasp them have atrophied. To say nothing
of God. But the fear of the inexplicable has not only impoverished
the reality of the individual; it has also narrowed the relationship
between one human being and another, which has as it were been lifted
out of the riverbed of infinite possibilities and set down in a
fallow place on the bank, where nothing happens. For it is not only
indolence that causes human relationships to be repeated from case
to case with such unspeakable monotony and boredom; it is timidity
before any new, inconceivable experience, which we don't think we
can deal with. But only someone who is ready for everything, who
doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible,
will live the relationship with another person as something alive
and will himself sound the depths of his own being. For if we imagine
this being of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it is
obvious that most people come to know only one corner of their room,
one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking
back and forth. In this way they have a certain security. And yet
how much more human is the dangerous in security that drives those
prisoners in Poe's stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible
dungeons and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their
cells. We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares have been
set around us, and there is nothing that should frighten or upset
us. We have been put into life as into the element we most accord
with, and we have, moreover, through thousands of years of adaptation,
come to resemble this life so greatly that when we hold still, through
a fortunate mimicry we can hardly be differentiated from everything
around us. We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our
world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our
terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there
are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our
life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must
always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the
most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience.
How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning
of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are
transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives
are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with
beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in
its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.
So you mustn't be frightened, dear Mr. Kappus, if a sadness rises
in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety,
like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and over everything
you do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that
life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will
not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness,
any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what
work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute
yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and
where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the
midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change.
If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind
that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from
what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its
whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it
gets better. In you, dear Mr. Kappus, so much is happening now;
you must be patient like someone who is sick, and confident like
some one who is recovering; for perhaps you are both. And more:
you are also the doctor, who has to watch over himself. But in every
sickness there are many days when the doctor can do nothing but
wait. And that is what you, insofar as you are your own doctor,
must now do, more than anything else.
TO TOP
Don't observe yourself too closely. Don't be too quick to draw
conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. Otherwise
it will be too easy for you to look with blame (that is: morally)
at your past, which naturally has a share in everything that now
meets you. But whatever errors, wishes, and yearnings of your boyhood
are operating in you now are not what you remember and condemn.
The extraordinary circumstances of a solitary and helpless childhood
are so difficult, so complicated, surrendered to so many influences
and at the same time so cut off from all real connection with life
that, where a vice enters it, one may not simply call it a vice.
One must be so careful with names anyway; it is so often the name
of an offense that a life shatters upon, not the nameless and personal
action itself, which was perhaps a quite definite necessity of that
life and could have been absorbed by it without any trouble. And
the expenditure of energy seems to you so great only because you
overvalue victory; it is not the "great thing" that you
think you have achieved, although you are right about your feeling;
the great thing is that there was already something there which
you could replace that deception with, something true and real.
Without this even your victory would have been just a moral reaction
of no great significance; but in fact it has be come a part of your
life. Your life, dear Mr. Kappus, which I think of with so many
good wishes. Do you remember how that life yearned out of childhood
toward the "great thing"? I see that it is now yearning
forth beyond the great thing toward the greater one. That is why
it does not cease to be difficult, but that is also why it will
not cease to grow.
And if there is one more thing that I must say to you, it is this:
Don't think that the person who is trying to comfort you now lives
untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes give
you pleasure. His life has much trouble and sadness, and remains
far behind yours. If it were otherwise, he would never have been
able to find those words.
Yours,
Rainer Maria Rilke"
May 12
Think, dear Sir, of the world that you carry inside
you, and call this thinking whatever you want to: a remembering
of your own childhood or a yearning toward a future of your own
- only be attentive to what is arising within you, and place that
above everything you perceive around you. What is happening in your
innermost self is worthy of your entire love; somehow you must find
a way to work at it, and not lose too much time or too much courage
in clarifying your attitude toward people. Who says that you have
any attitude at all? l know, your profession is hard and full of
things that contradict you, and I foresaw your lament and knew that
it would come. Now that it has come, there is nothing I can say
to reassure you, I can only suggest that perhaps all professions
are like that, filled with demands, filled with hostility toward
the individual, saturated as it were with the hatred of those who
find themselves mute and sullen in an insipid duty. The situation
you must live in now is not more heavily burdened with conventions,
prejudices, and false ideas than all the other situations, and if
there are some that pretend to offer a greater freedom, there is
nevertheless none that is, in itself, vast and spacious and connected
to the important Things that the truest kind of life consists of.
Only the individual who is solitary is placed under the deepest
laws like a Thing, and when he walks out into the rising dawn or
looks out into the event-filled evening and when he feels what is
happening there, all situations drop from him as if from a dead
man, though he stands in the midst of pure life. What you, dear
Mr. Kappus, now have to experience as an officer, you would have
felt in just the same way in any of the established professions;
yes, even if, outside any position, you had simply tried to find
some easy and independent contact with society, this feeling of
being hemmed in would not have been spared you. It is like this
everywhere; but that is no cause for anxiety or sadness; if there
is nothing you can share with other people, try to be close to Things;
they will not abandon you; and the nights are still there, and the
winds that move through the trees and across many lands; everything
in the world of Things and animals is still filled with happening,
which you can take part in; and children are still the way you were
as a child, sad and happy in just the same way and if you think
of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary
children, and the grownups are nothing, and their dignity has no
value.
May19
Think, dear Sir, of the world that you carry inside you, and call
this thinking whatever you want to: a remembering of your own childhood
or a yearning toward a future of your own - only be attentive to
what is arising within you, and place that above everything you
perceive around you. What is happening in your innermost self is
worthy of your entire love; somehow you must find a way to work
at it, and not lose too much time or too much courage in clarifying
your attitude toward people. Who says that you have any attitude
at all? l know, your profession is hard and full of things that
contradict you, and I foresaw your lament and knew that it would
come. Now that it has come, there is nothing I can say to reassure
you, I can only suggest that perhaps all professions are like that,
filled with demands, filled with hostility toward the individual,
saturated as it were with the hatred of those who find themselves
mute and sullen in an insipid duty. The situation you must live
in now is not more heavily burdened with conventions, prejudices,
and false ideas than all the other situations, and if there are
some that pretend to offer a greater freedom, there is nevertheless
none that is, in itself, vast and spacious and connected to the
important Things that the truest kind of life consists of. Only
the individual who is solitary is placed under the deepest laws
like a Thing, and when he walks out into the rising dawn or looks
out into the event-filled evening and when he feels what is happening
there, all situations drop from him as if from a dead man, though
he stands in the midst of pure life. What you, dear Mr. Kappus,
now have to experience as an officer, you would have felt in just
the same way in any of the established professions; yes, even if,
outside any position, you had simply tried to find some easy and
independent contact with society, this feeling of being hemmed in
would not have been spared you. It is like this everywhere; but
that is no cause for anxiety or sadness; if there is nothing you
can share with other people, try to be close to Things; they will
not abandon you; and the nights are still there, and the winds that
move through the trees and across many lands; everything in the
world of Things and animals is still filled with happening, which
you can take part in; and children are still the way you were as
a child, sad and happy in just the same way and if you think of
your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary
children, and the grownups are nothing, and their dignity has no
value.
May 26
Think, dear Sir, of the world that you carry inside you, and call
this thinking whatever you want to: a remembering of your own childhood
or a yearning toward a future of your own - only be attentive to
what is arising within you, and place that above everything you
perceive around you. What is happening in your innermost self is
worthy of your entire love; somehow you must find a way to work
at it, and not lose too much time or too much courage in clarifying
your attitude toward people. Who says that you have any attitude
at all? l know, your profession is hard and full of things that
contradict you, and I foresaw your lament and knew that it would
come. Now that it has come, there is nothing I can say to reassure
you, I can only suggest that perhaps all professions are like that,
filled with demands, filled with hostility toward the individual,
saturated as it were with the hatred of those who find themselves
mute and sullen in an insipid duty. The situation you must live
in now is not more heavily burdened with conventions, prejudices,
and false ideas than all the other situations, and if there are
some that pretend to offer a greater freedom, there is nevertheless
none that is, in itself, vast and spacious and connected to the
important Things that the truest kind of life consists of. Only
the individual who is solitary is placed under the deepest laws
like a Thing, and when he walks out into the rising dawn or looks
out into the event-filled evening and when he feels what is happening
there, all situations drop from him as if from a dead man, though
he stands in the midst of pure life. What you, dear Mr. Kappus,
now have to experience as an officer, you would have felt in just
the same way in any of the established professions; yes, even if,
outside any position, you had simply tried to find some easy and
independent contact with society, this feeling of being hemmed in
would not have been spared you. It is like this everywhere; but
that is no cause for anxiety or sadness; if there is nothing you
can share with other people, try to be close to Things; they will
not abandon you; and the nights are still there, and the winds that
move through the trees and across many lands; everything in the
world of Things and animals is still filled with happening, which
you can take part in; and children are still the way you were as
a child, sad and happy in just the same way and if you think of
your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary
children, and the grownups are nothing, and their dignity has no
value.
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