Do not assume that he who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, he would never have been able to find these words.- Rainer Maria Rilke
Thursday, April 02, 2009
Thought for the day ...
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What a lovely, if sad, sentiment.
ReplyDeleteMakes me think of the opening lines of Rilke's Tenth Duino Elegy:
ReplyDelete"Someday, emerging at last from the violent insight,
let me sing out jubilation and praise to assenting angels.
Let not even one of the clearly-struck hammers of my heart
fail to sound because of a slack, a doubtful,
or a broken string. Let my joyfully streaming face
make me more radiant; let my hidden weeping arise
and blossom. How dear you will be to me then, you nights
of anguish. Why didn't I kneel more deeply to accept you,
inconsolable sisters, and, surrendering, lose myself
in your loosened hair. How we squander our hours of pain.
How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration
to see if they have an end. Though they are really
our winter-enduring foliage, our dark evergreen,
one season in our inner year-, not only a season
in time-, but are place and settlement, foundation and soil
and home."
Rilke constantly sounded the refrain that it is from our suffering that we are deepened, become stronger, and not coincidentally better people as well as better artists. There's some similar thoughts in the Letters to a Young Poet.