My new friend, mentioned in the post below, tossed out a comment about her affection for Rilke. Turning my library over the other day I unearthed my copy of Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties and had it on the kitchen table for a reading. Tossing the pages about I stumbled upon this text, underlined years ago:
"You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.I always liked that somehow. The idea I came away with was to embrace the questions and trust that perhaps the answer would come in time. I've always found comfort in this idea.
"Resolve to be always beginning—to be a beginner!"
Leave a comment