Liberal Arts Blog — Rainer Maria Rilke: Widely Influential, Popular German Mystic Poet
Liberal Arts Blog — Tuesday is the Joy of Literature, Language, Religion, and Culture Day
Today’s Topic — Rainer Maria Rilke: Widely Influential, Popular German Mystic Poet
His poetry reminds me of that of Rumi, the Persian Sufi poet of the 13th century. And no wonder then that, like Rumi, he is still one of the best selling poets in 21st century America. The United States is a country obsessed with self-improvement and with religion and Rilke’s prose and poetry is full of both. Today, some quotes from Rilke who was born in Prague, lived in Paris before World War One, and died of leukemia at age 51 in Montreux, Switzerland. Experts — please chime in. Correct, elaborate, elucidate.
THE DRAGONS IN OUR LIVES, THE YEARNING FOR LOVE. PATIENCE
1. “Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.”
2. “Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
3. “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given 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.”
NB: “We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.”
THE ENDING OF JOJO RABBIT (2019), THE OSCAR-WINNING FILM,
1. “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”
2. The lines are from Rilke’s poem, “Go To the Limits of Your Longing.”
3. “In the context of the movie, the message is that love can conquer hate, even if we will experience terrible loss. The poem further says that even the most extreme experiences and emotions will not last, and that sometimes just keeping faith in the passage of time — rather than worrying about it — can relieve us from pain which threatens to overwhelm us.” (Ulrich Baer)
NB: “The story in the film also dramatically captures Rilke’s famous line that if you love someone, you must set them free. The movie’s child protagonist has to learn what many of us never learn: that to love someone means to allow them their freedom to become truly themselves, rather than confine them to our image of them.” (Ulrich Baer)
RILKE’S ADVICE TO A YOUNG POET (1902–1908), published 1929, posthumously
1. “Admit, in all honesty, whether or not you would die if you weren’t allowed to write.”
2. “ This above all: Ask yourself, in your night’s quietest moment, Do I have to write?”
3. “Dig deep down into yourself for the answer. And if it is yes, if you can meet this solemn question with a strong and simple “I must,” then build your life around that necessity.”
NB: “Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody. There is only one way. Go into yourself.”
FOOTNOTE #1 — A POEM- THE BOOK OF HOURS (1905)
1.) “Extinguish my eyes, I’ll go on seeing you.
Seal my ears, I’ll go on hearing you.
2.) And without feet I can make my way to you,
without a mouth I can swear your name.
3.) Break off my arms, I’ll take hold of you
with my heart as with a hand.
NB: Stop my heart, and my brain will start to beat.
And if you consume my brain with fire,
I’ll feel you burn in every drop of my blood.”
FOOTNOTE #2 — HIS EPITAPH, RODIN, CEZANNE
1.) He wrote his own epitaph:
“Rose, o pure contradiction, desire to be no one’s sleep beneath so many lids.” The German for lids is “lidern” which is a quasi-homonym for “lieder” which means “songs.” An epitome of the untranslatability of all poetry. And yet the basic ideas are universal and timeless.
2.) Rilke was for a time a secretary to the sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840–1916).
3.) He was obsessed with the French painter Cezanne (1839–1906) “Only a saint could be as united with his God as Cézanne was with his work,” he wrote in a letter to his wife, the sculptor Clara Westhoff (1878–1954). The photo above is of Cezanne.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_to_a_Young_Poet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jojo_Rabbit#Critical_response
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Hours
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/rainer-maria-rilke
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YOUR TURN
Please share the coolest thing you learned this week related to words, language, literature, religion, culture. Or, even better, the coolest or mos important thing you learned in your life related to Words, Language, Literature (eg. quotes, poetry, vocabulary) that you have not yet shared.
This is your chance to make someone else’s day. Or to cement in your own mind something that you might otherwise forget. Or to think more deeply than otherwise about something dear to your heart. Continuity is key to depth of thought.
