Church, Cloud Study, 1871
Rainer Maria Rilke
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.
Rainer Maria Rilke
No comments:
Post a Comment