But fear of the inexplicable has not alone impoverished the
existence of the individual; the relationship between one human being and
another has also been cramped by it, as though it had been lifted out of the
riverbed of endless possibilities and set down in a fallow spot on the bank, to
which nothing happens. For it is not inertia alone that is responsible for
human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably
monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable
experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope.
But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes
nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as
something alive and will himself draw exhaustively from his own existence. For
if we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it
appears evident that most people learn to know only a corner of their room, a
place by the window, a strip of floor on which they walk up and down. Thus they
have a certain security. And yet that dangerous insecurity is so much more
human which drives the prisoners in Poe's stories to feel out the shapes of
their horrible dungeons and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their
abode.
We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares are set
about us, and there is nothing which should intimidate or worry us. We are set
down in life as in the element to which we best correspond, and over and above
this we have through thousands of years of accommodation become so like this
life, that when we hold still we are, through a happy mimicry, scarcely to be
distinguished from all that surrounds us. We have no reason to mistrust our
world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it
abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love
them. And if only we arrange our life according to that principle which
counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now
still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most
faithful. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths about dragons
that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our
lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave.
Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that
wants help from us.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
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