Rilke on sadness.
rejo1cing gave me Letters to a Young Poet for my 22nd birthday, and i absolutely love this book. his letters are beautifully written, deep with inspiration and rich in wisdom. his wording can be complex at times, and often, i have to read a section multiple times to catch the fullness of what he's trying to convey.
the following is one of my favourite passages thus far. i hope you'll take the time to read it, and you, too, can be astounded by the way rilke is able to articulate the unsaid happenings of the grieving heart.
You have had many great sadnesses, which passed. And you say that even this passing was hard for you and put you out of sorts. But, please, consider whether these great sadnesses have not rather gone right through the center of yourself? Whether much in you has not altered, whether you have not somewhere, at some point of your being, undergone a change while you were sad? Only those sadnesses are dangerous and bad which one carries about among people in order to drown them out; like sicknesses that are superficially and foolishly treated they simply withdraw and after a little pause break out and are life, are unlived, spurned, lost life, of which one may die. Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and yet a little way beyond the outworks of our divining, perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent.
I believe that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension that we find paralyzing because we no longer hear our surprised feelings living. Because we are alone with the alien thing that has entered into our self; because everything intimate and accustomed is for an instant taken away; because we stand in the middle of a transition where we cannot remain standing. For this reason the sadness too passes: the new thing in us, the added thing, has entered into our heart, has gone into its inmost chamber and is not even there any more,--is already in our blood. And we do not learn what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing has happened, and yet we have changed, as a house changes into which a guest has entered. We cannot say who has come, perhaps we shall never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters into us in this way in order to transform itself in us long before it happens. And this is why it is so important to be lonely and attentive when one is sad: because the apparently uneventful and stark moment at which our future sets foot in us is so much closer to life than that other noisy and fortuitous point of time at which it happens to us as if from outside. The more still, more patient and more open we are when we are sad, so much the deeper and so much the more unswervingly does the new go into us, so much the better do we make it ours ...
So you must not be frightened ... if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloud-shadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any agitation, any pain, any melancholy, since you really do not know what these states are working upon you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question whence all this may be coming and whither it is bound? Since you know that you are in the midst of transitions and wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything morbid in your processes, just remember that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself of foreign matter; so one must just help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and break out with it, for that is its progress. In you ... so much is now happening; you must be patient as a sick man and confident as a convalescent; for perhaps you are both. And more: you are the doctor too, who has to watch over himself. But there are in every illness many days when the doctor can do nothing but wait. And this it is that you, insofar as you are your own doctor, must now above all do.
Do not observe yourself too much. Do not draw too hasty conclusions from what happens to you; let it simply happen to you.
when i recall the periods i experienced the most heartache, moments when i felt myself crumbling and in utter anguish, i didn't take the time for solitude. i too often worked to dismiss the cause of my disappointment and sought ways to quickly bring myself back to happiness. maybe i drowned my sorrows out with people, and maybe i didn't let something new, some wisdom from my wounded experience, take residence in myself. that begs me to question what i've truly learned at all. my revelations from these past experiences could have been that much more had i taken the time to allow my heart's sickness chart its course and my body to purge itself. i had been too fearful of grief, trying to quickly pass through my difficult times in hopes that sadness would not be able to grip me.
i've realized that i'm too impatient; i rush through the motions of life and the sentiments of my heart. and even to that, rilke has a response:
There is here no measuring with time, no year matters, and ten years are nothing. Being ... means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and wide. I learn it daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful: patience is everything!
excerpts from: Rilke, RM. Letters to a Young Poet. Trans. M.D. Herter Norton. New York: Norton, 1934.
the following is one of my favourite passages thus far. i hope you'll take the time to read it, and you, too, can be astounded by the way rilke is able to articulate the unsaid happenings of the grieving heart.
You have had many great sadnesses, which passed. And you say that even this passing was hard for you and put you out of sorts. But, please, consider whether these great sadnesses have not rather gone right through the center of yourself? Whether much in you has not altered, whether you have not somewhere, at some point of your being, undergone a change while you were sad? Only those sadnesses are dangerous and bad which one carries about among people in order to drown them out; like sicknesses that are superficially and foolishly treated they simply withdraw and after a little pause break out and are life, are unlived, spurned, lost life, of which one may die. Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and yet a little way beyond the outworks of our divining, perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent.
I believe that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension that we find paralyzing because we no longer hear our surprised feelings living. Because we are alone with the alien thing that has entered into our self; because everything intimate and accustomed is for an instant taken away; because we stand in the middle of a transition where we cannot remain standing. For this reason the sadness too passes: the new thing in us, the added thing, has entered into our heart, has gone into its inmost chamber and is not even there any more,--is already in our blood. And we do not learn what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing has happened, and yet we have changed, as a house changes into which a guest has entered. We cannot say who has come, perhaps we shall never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters into us in this way in order to transform itself in us long before it happens. And this is why it is so important to be lonely and attentive when one is sad: because the apparently uneventful and stark moment at which our future sets foot in us is so much closer to life than that other noisy and fortuitous point of time at which it happens to us as if from outside. The more still, more patient and more open we are when we are sad, so much the deeper and so much the more unswervingly does the new go into us, so much the better do we make it ours ...
So you must not be frightened ... if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloud-shadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any agitation, any pain, any melancholy, since you really do not know what these states are working upon you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question whence all this may be coming and whither it is bound? Since you know that you are in the midst of transitions and wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything morbid in your processes, just remember that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself of foreign matter; so one must just help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and break out with it, for that is its progress. In you ... so much is now happening; you must be patient as a sick man and confident as a convalescent; for perhaps you are both. And more: you are the doctor too, who has to watch over himself. But there are in every illness many days when the doctor can do nothing but wait. And this it is that you, insofar as you are your own doctor, must now above all do.
Do not observe yourself too much. Do not draw too hasty conclusions from what happens to you; let it simply happen to you.
when i recall the periods i experienced the most heartache, moments when i felt myself crumbling and in utter anguish, i didn't take the time for solitude. i too often worked to dismiss the cause of my disappointment and sought ways to quickly bring myself back to happiness. maybe i drowned my sorrows out with people, and maybe i didn't let something new, some wisdom from my wounded experience, take residence in myself. that begs me to question what i've truly learned at all. my revelations from these past experiences could have been that much more had i taken the time to allow my heart's sickness chart its course and my body to purge itself. i had been too fearful of grief, trying to quickly pass through my difficult times in hopes that sadness would not be able to grip me.
i've realized that i'm too impatient; i rush through the motions of life and the sentiments of my heart. and even to that, rilke has a response:
There is here no measuring with time, no year matters, and ten years are nothing. Being ... means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and wide. I learn it daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful: patience is everything!
excerpts from: Rilke, RM. Letters to a Young Poet. Trans. M.D. Herter Norton. New York: Norton, 1934.