Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here,
We are solitary. (skip) It can, of course, make us dizzy, for everything our eyes rest upon will be taken from us, no longer is anything near, and what is far is endlessly far.
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go the the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
What locks itself in sameness has congealed.
It is safer to be gray and numb?
What turns hard becomes rigid
and is easily shattered.
Pour yourself out like a fountain.
Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking
finishes often at the start, and , with ending, begins.
love your solitude and bear the pain of it without self-pity. The distance you feel from those around you should trouble you no more than your distance from the farthest stars. (skip) When you see them, love life in a form that is not your own, and be kind to all the people who are afraid of their aloneness.
When I lean over the chasm of myself-
it seems
my God is dark
and like a web: a hundred roots.
silently drinking.
This is the ferment I grow out of.
From infinite longings
finite deeds arise...
But in these dancing tears,
what is often withheld can be found:
our strength.
Sometimes I have stopped spontaneously in towns along my way only to taste the delight that no living being can imagine me there. How much that added to the lightness of my soul!
I remember certain days in Cordova where I lived as if transparent, because I was completely unknown.
But in the midst of these very unfamiliar conditions your inner solitude will be a support and a home to you.
because we can't keep standing as the ground shifts under our feet. That is why the sadness passes over like a wave. (skip) That is why it is so important to be alone and attentive when you are sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than any loud and accidental point of time which occurs, as it were, from the outside.
Impermanence plunges us into the depth of all Being. And so all forms of the present are not to be taken and bound in time, but held in a larger context of meaning in which we participate.
I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.
diminishing nothing, defined by nothing outside itself,
all coming from within, clothed in softness
and radiant in its own light,
See the flowers, so faithful to Earth.
We know their fate because we share it.
Were they to grieve for their wilting,
that grief would be ours to feel.
There's lightness in things. Only we move forever burdened,
pressing ourselves into everything, obsessed by weight.
How strange and devouring our ways must seem
to those for whom life is enough.
People have even made eating into something it is not meant to be.
Only what is within you is near; all else is far.
And this within: so packed and pressured,
barely contained, unsayable.
The island could be a star so insignificant
that space in its terrible blindness takes no note
and mindlessly destroys it.
Thus, unillumined and unheard,
expecting nothing
but that all this may yet come to an end,
it contains doggedly its self-invented course,
alone, outside the patterns made
by planets and the suns they orbit.
For the creative artist there is not impoverishment and no worthless place.
I come home from the soaring
in which I lost myself.
UNAFRAID OF WHAT IS DIFFICULT
Dont' be confused by the nature of solitude, when something inside you wants to break free of your loneliness. This very wish, when you use it as a tool for understanding, can illumine your solitude and expand it to include all that is. Bound by conventions, people tend to afraid of what is difficult. For all living things in nature must unfold in their particular way and become themselves at any cost and despite all opposition.
This is what the things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.
Once
for each, only once. Never again. But
to have lived even once,
to have been of Earth - that cannot be taken from us.
When you feel no commonality between yourself and other people, try to be close to Things, which will not abandon you. Nights are still there and winds that blow through the trees and over many lands.
CITIES
The people there live harsh and heavy,
crowded together, weary of their own routines.
(skip)
They don't know that somewhere
wind is blowing through a field of flowers.
Every time doubt wants to spoil something for you, ask why it finds something ugly and demand proofs.
You, my own deep soul,
trust me. I will not betray you.
My blood is alive with many voices
telling me I am made of longing.
What mystery breaks over me now?
In its shadow I come into life.
For the first time I am alone with you-
you, my power to feel.
Live for awhile in the books you love.
When I go toward you
it is with my whole life.
Why would you want to exclude from your life any uneasiness, any pain, any depression, since you don't know what work they are accomplishing within you?
SONG OF THE BEGGAR
Every so often I cradle my right ear
in my right hand.
(skip)
At times I even close my eyes
so my face can disappear.
The way it lies with its full weight in my hands,
it is almost like rest.
Then no one will think I lack a place
to lay my head.
Friends must be the ends and not the means.
Words that, against her will,
swarmed within her,
now fly around her, shrieking,
But those may be the very moments when your solitude can grow; its growing is painful as the growing of boys and sad as the beginning of the spring. But don't be confused. All that is needed is the capacity to be alone with yourself, to go into yourself and meet no one for hours - that is what you need to achieve. To be alone, the way you were as a child, when the grown-ups walked around so busy and distracted by matters that seemed important because they were beyond your comprehension.
I did not dream that such a storm of hear and spirit could come over me. That I survived it! That I survived it.
Enough. It is here.
I went outside in the cold moonlight and I caressed this little chateau Muzot as though it were a living thing - the old wall that harbored me -
Go within yourself and probe the depths from which your life springs, and there at its source you'll find the answer to the question of whether you must writie. Accept this answer, just as you hear it, without hesitation. It may be revealed that you are called to be an artist. Then take this lot upon you, and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without asking for any external reward. For the creative artist must be a world for himself, and find everything within himself - and in nature, to which he is devoted.
- 하루에 한 단락 정도의 발췌문을 읽도록 모아논 365 개의 릴케의 문장들을 잠들기 전 읽은지 한 달 정도 지났다. 지난 달의 피폐한 글과 책 속에서 이 글들을 정리하는 시간은 나의 정신을 가다듬고 보듬는 시간이 된 듯하다.
어떻게 설명해야 하는 지는 모르겠지만, 말테의 수기를 쓴 사람의 절망을 아는 사람이 이토록 희망의 문장을 쓸 수 있다는 것은 신비롭기까지 하다. 그의 문장은 너무도 아름답고도, 슬프면서도, 강하고, 진실되다.
혼돈, 대립, 갈등, 고독 모든 것을 위대한 글을 위한 재료로 삼을 수 있는 강한 영혼을 가졌던 릴케를 동경하며, 그가 준 문장 속에서 한때는 바닥에 내팽겨쳤던 희망을 다시 주워 담는다.
댓글 없음:
댓글 쓰기