Celebrating the work of Rainer Maria Rilke, born on this day in 1875.
Everywhere transience is plunging into the depths of Being… It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again, “invisibly,” inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, writing to his Polish translator about writing the “Duino Elegies”
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I am learning to see. I don’t know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply and doesn’t stop where it once used to. I have an interior that I never knew of. Everything passes into it now. I don’t know what happens there.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, from “The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge,” (1910)