Possible Explanation on The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

Found this on youtube- such a privilege to hear a lecture without going to class- which was the part I hated most:




NOTES:

The person which changes history is rarely ever prepared for it- it just happens.
Experience- meditation and learning something from them not simply things happening to you.
Not only let time pass but give time to things around you and CARE about them.
Aha so he's jumping around in time! Now the existence of those weird passages make sense.
"The world is mysterious but the world offers us a kind of intimacy that does correspond ultimately to some of our deepest desires."-it's all real.
Can we share being with someone else? It's funny I asked myself the same question and personally I think it will always be limited- what we are able to share.
Objects can become personal and can take on emotions.

The passage about the girls going to the city is very interesting- he's actually talking about the role of women throughout the centuries- and how they've always had to do all the work "both sides of the dialogue" (in a relationship). Not within society specifically but within a relationship- within love.
Love shows us reality.
The Prodigal Son was lacking reality- the love was not real for him.
Love imposes demands on the ones whom you love.
It opens us up to a life in which not all of our questions can be answered but at least can be asked.

---
Interesting lecture- I liked his analysis on women- which I didn't pick up on while reading the book- like many other things. Still don't understand his analysis of his family and the vanishing house. A little bit more clear on what the book is about- basically how to love. And I guess the prodigal son connects with his learning how to love. He was angry that no one understood who he REALLY was- they just loved him blindly. This can easily happen in a relationship- when we love our partner based on an ideal and not the real person within them, and actually not even having an interest- for we love our ideal more. And then he realized that this selfless love is enough to understand him- for love doesn't need to be concrete- it encompasses all. From what I understand- which doesn't mean much- is that love doesn't need to be concrete, because it engulfs every detail of our soul, no matter WHICH detail it is. If that makes any sense. For example- I don't know EXACTLY what I love about you, which detail in your soul and where it is located- such as CONCRETELY what you are feeling- but I love it all anyway, even though I can't put my finger on it exactly. If that makes ANY sense.
I don't know I was struggling with this question as well- and I guess it DOESN'T matter if the person knows exactly the world within me, because their love can reach every part of my soul without them knowing the direction.
 That doesn't make sense does it? I don't know. All I know is that it encompasses the REAL without even our knowledge or know-how. In short: it does it's own thing and it is beyond us.

The Notebooks Of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rilke

As an introduction- I just left all of my impressions while reading this book- so 

please excuse my freaking out when I thought Malte died (some creepy ghost walking

around- like a horror movie- sorry I am affected by today's media). Also I still 

don't understand many things- like what does the vanishing house mean. Why are dead

people walking around- why is he TALKING to dead people? Or maybe I just misunderstood

everything which is quite possible. In the end, though, it doesn't really matter

what I understood because I don't read books for "plots"- I read them for their 

concepts, and trust me- I got some very delicious ones from this book. Very 

satisfying I must say! If you want to be super confused and not understand lit

anymore- read this! Anyway I must read this again and again- throughout the years. 

Rilke though- there's a very special place in my heart for him. Not as high as

Dostoevsky- because Rilke is too delicate to concern himself with the insanity 

of consciousness- but all the same, very special.  

"God! it's all  there. God! It's all there waiting for us. We come along, we find 

a life, ready-made, off the peg, and all we have to do is put it on. 
You want to go, or you are forced to: 'No trouble at all, sir. Voila 
votre mort, monsieur'*." 

"And had anyone thought to ask what might be the cause of it all, what 
might have called down this glut of destruction upon this closely 
guarded room, there would have been only one answer to give: death."

It's very funny how the living react to the material possessions of a deceased one, 

how odd and ridiculous it becomes. For it is irrelevant to the death itself.

"To write a single line of verse one must see many cities, people, things, one 

must know animals, one must feel birds flying and know the movements flowers make

as they open up in the morning. One must be able to think back to roads in

unfamiliar  regions, unexpected encounters, and partings which one saw coming long 
before;" 

"And having memories is still not enough. If there are a great many, one must be 
able to forget them, and one must have the patience to wait until they return. 

For the memories are not what's essential. It's only when they become blood within

us, become our nameless looks and signs that are no longer distinguishable 

from ourselves—not until then does it happen that, in a very rare moment, the 

first word of a verse rises in their midst and goes forth from among them." 

"At the same time they're living among other people, not the 'third' persons but

the two, about whom such an incredible number of things might be said and of whom

not a word is ever spoken, though they suffer and do things and don't know how to 

help each other."

How weak and helpless the "unimportant" characters are. 

"Ah then: is it possible to believe that one could have a God and not use 
him?" 

"Similarly it's all scattered about within me, -- the 

rooms, the staircases which opened onto the ground 

floor with such great elaborateness and other narrow 

circular stairways in whose darkness one travelled like

blood through veins; the tower rooms, the high 

balconies, the unexpected galleries one was urged along

from the little entrance door: --all that is still 

within me and will never cease being within me. It's 

as if the image of this house had plunged into me from

an infinite height and smashed to pieces on the 

foundation of my being. "

What memories can become within you- they materialize within your blood within 

your veins. They ARE you. This is an extremely poetic passage- someone should 

make a drawing based on this. Imagine how beautiful it can be- all of these

fragments. I am absolutely fascinated with the combination of the material and the

abstract.  

"I saw an old man who was blind and shouted. That's what I saw. Saw."

I'm absolutely in love with his style. He is so direct and simple and yet extremely

witty. 

"Also there was the sweet lingering smell of neglected breast-feeding 
babies, and the smell of anxious children setting off to school, and 
of the muggy beds of older lads. And a lot of the smells were those 
that had come up from below out of the chasm of the street; they'd 
evaporated; and others had dripped down in the rain which over cities 
is not pure."

SMELLS!!! The smells of our FEELINGS- what we emit from inside of us- without even

knowing! And there's one wall which traps in all the smells brought in by the wind.

I'm sorry at this rate I'll be copying/pasting the whole book: 

"Yes, he knew he was withdrawing himself from everything, not only from 
human beings. One moment more and everything would be gone from his 
mind and this table and this cup and the chair he was clinging to, 
everything in his daily life, everything close to him would have 
become unintelligible, foreign, difficult. So he sat there and waited 
for it to have happened. And he offered no more resistance."  

We cling to the material objects in order not to retreat within ourselves.  

"Though the world does look good to me. What 
would I do in another one? I would so like to remain among the 
meanings which have become dear to me, and if there were something 
that really has to change I would want, at the very least, to be 
allowed to live among dogs who have a world that is related to ours 
and has the same things."

What do you think it means to remain with your meanings? To remain in a world of 

memories? 

"And with whatever it 

is that comes along there also appears a whole tangle of confused 
memories that hang from it like wet seaweed from some sunken thing. 
Lives that you could never have heard of emerge from the depths and 
blend in with what had really happened, and they oust the past that 
you thought you knew; for in what rises is a new rested strength that 
had always been there and is weary from too frequent remembering." 

How frightening- it was there all along. And you thought you knew!

"Your heart drives you out of yourself, your heart pursues you and you are 
already almost outside yourself and can no longer get back in."

He has an almost crude appreciation of the music genius- comparing the music after 

Beethoven's death to semen spewing out while the musicians play with it but aren't 

satisfied. "But, Master, if, somewhere, a virginal young man were to lay his 
wakeful ear beside your music, he would die of bliss, or he would 
carry infinity inside him and his fertilised brain would burst from 
sheer birth." The birth happens in the mind due to the music fertilizing 

the idea. 

Fame- "And now they go around with you as if as if you were like them. 
And they take your words around with them in the cages of their 
darkness and reveal them in public places and tease them a little out 
of their safety." 

And:  

"They suspected that in all of this they had acted as he had willed them to 
act; they had strengthened him in his solitude and had helped him 
separate himself from them for ever. And now they'd changed their 
method and and were bringing to bear the ultimate form of opposition: 
fame. And at this clamour practically everyone looked up and let 
themselves be entertained." 

An extremely curious thing about Erik- I didn't realize it until they were talking 

together in the dark that he had died. That this little  boy in fact, was speaking

about dead people as if they were alive. It even begs the question- is Malte also 

dead? Because he keeps describing his fevers. 

Beautiful description about him and his lover- both on an island with a lion and a 

unicorn. I wonder whether that's connected to the drawings of islands when he 

was a child?

"Now, when so much is changing, they too want to change. 
They're very close to giving up on themselves and to thinking about 
themselves in the way that how men might speak of them in their 
absence. This seems progress to them. Already they're almost persuaded 
that you search for one pleasure and then another and then an even 
greater one: that life consists in this, if you don't want to lose it 
through some kind of silliness. They've already begun to look around, 
to search; they whose strength has always resided in being found." 

Sometimes we want to force change. We are always on the brink of something.

I don't understand the part about the house vanishing. Furthermore my suspicion is

growing that they're all dead. "'We're rising up around here like ghosts, 'and 
helped us back down the steps." and

"It became clear to me that all these recognisably grown up people who just a 
short time ago had been talking and laughing were going round back 
bent busying themselves with something invisible, and that they were 
admitting they couldn't see the something that was there. And what was 
terrifying was the fact that it was stronger than all of them." 

Why does the house vanish again?? What does it symbolize? Is it their death- their 

past existence? 

"No, no, there's nothing in the world that we can imagine, not the 
least thing. It's because everything is composed of so many single 
details that are unforeseeable. We ignore them in the hurry of using 
our imagination, so we don't know they're missing. But realities are 
slow and indescribably detailed."

Our imagination is hurried and to a point even desperate.

"For now I knew that out there things were going along with the same complete 
indifference, and that also out there was nothing except my 
loneliness. The loneliness that I had brought upon myself and to whose 
size my heart no longer bore any comparison. I thought of people I'd 
walked away from and I didn't understand how one could abandon people." 

TIME = MONEY funny character this Nikolaj Kusmitsch! Rilke managed to bring a 

classic russian literature feel in this astounding work. 

"And as he sat there in the dark room with 
his eyes wide open he began to understand that what he was feeling now 
was real time passing. He actually recognised all these seconds, all 
tepid, uniform, but fast, fast." 

Ok I think this is my new favorite book- it even surpasses Notes from the Under-

ground. How could one even ever think of this?

"You see, humans --if we're 
allowed, simply in passing, to compare them with tin lids-- humans 
sit on their occupations with the greatest reluctance and ill-humour."

Why yes let's compare lids and human beings. "Let's 
be perfectly honest and say: basically they're thinking of only one 
thing which is jumping down as soon as they can and roll about and 
make tinny sounds."

But I get it- it refers to our significance and our purpose in life. We each have 

our own use- we each are a lid which corresponds to our fulfillment in life. 

"From that time onwards his blood knew 
it was inside a lost man and it wanted to leave." 

Personifying blood as if it was another organism within us. It signifies the 

demon within us- the thing we cannot help. An animal, our passions. 

"No, Bettina is the one who has become more real in me; 
Abelone, who I knew, was like a preparation for her and for me now she 
had disappeared into Bettina as if into her own instictive self." 

A human being prepared him for being able to understand a concept, a character. 

"The woman who is in love 
always surpasses the man she loves because life is greater than fate. 
Her devotion wants to be immense: this is her bliss. But the nameless 
sorrow of her love has always been this: that what is asked of her is 
that her devotion be kept within limits." 

It is our misfortune and curse. Life is greater than fate- for life is always 

changing and is flexible. It can breathe, it is an organism, a creature. 

"They walk past the houses, 
people are continually coming along who blot them out, they go on 
fading until they are nothing." 

There's something terrible about having the power to make people fade away. 

"But somewhere there's still a piece of 
our disguise clinging to us that we've forgotten about. There's a 
trace of exaggeration on our eyebrows; we don't notice that the 
corners of our mouths are twisted. And this is how we go around, an 
absolute laughing-stock: neither a real being nor an actor."

"To be loved means to be consumed by fire. To love is: giving light 
with inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to pass away; to love is to 
endure."

Using the parable about the Prodigal Son and how he did not want to be loved makes 

me wonder whether it is in fact about Malte himself. How interesting, that for some

unconditional love can actually hurt and drive one away. "For in his loneliness, he 
had loved and loved again, each time wasting his whole nature and 
entertaining inexpressible fears for the freedom of the other person. 
Slowly he had learnt to shine the rays of his emotion into his beloved 
instead of consuming the emotion in her." He learned to give love, instead of 

taking love away. And yet he craved for love to be given to back to him. I think

he found love in the sacred, in something spiritual- something beyond him. 

"I see more than just him. I see his whole existence, which 
was then taking up the long love to God, the silent goalless toil of 
it."

-----------------------------------------------------------

I have to be honest- I didn't really understand this book, but it has made a 

tremendous impression on me. I love parts of it- descriptions of places, of ideas

and concepts, of people... So sweet and delicate. He has extremely weird 

observations about life- and about his consciousness. I admire this book- and it 

has a special place in my heart. But yes the problem is that some parts confused me

especially about his family, and certain passages which he rambled on and on- like

about the king. I still don't know what the point of that is. I think my next task

is to read explanations based on this book and maybe clear some things out. But I 

always hate reading interpretations because they are not close to what I feel 

about the book- for me being close to a spiritual experience.  

I love what he wrote about death- I thought about it a lot- one time on the metro-

imagining what Rilke said- that it's there within us growing. It was strange to 

look at the people and see in each death, while their physical bodies are growing

and stretching so full of life. And the part about the lid will never leave my 

memory- I have to ponder on that some more... we all should. Oh Rilke what wonders

you have blessed me with- my mind is full of riches! 

Also in my search for finding some explanation to this book- I found this wonderful 

art book by Ben Shahn (For the sake of a Single Verse): 

Very cool!!! :) I wish I lived in a country where this would be available... 

-- 

Pub Pdf- Translated by William Needham 

The Poet's Guide to Life by Rilke

"Be out of sync with your times for just one day, and you will see how much eternity you contain within you."

"How numerous and manifold is everything that is yet to come, and how differently it all surfaces and how differently it all passes the way we expect. How poor we are in imagination, fantasy, and expectation, how lightly and superficially we take ourselves in making plans only for reality then to arrive and play its melodies on us!"

Life is but a masterpiece that only a Genius could create- He is constantly moving His hands, adding unpredictable strokes to our seconds...our leaking seconds. Such spontaneity! Beyond our pathetic minds!

"One may dream while others are saviors if these dreams are more real to oneself than reality and more necessary than bread. In a word: one ought to turn the most extreme possibility inside oneself into the measure of one's life, for our life is vast and can accommodate as much future as we are able to carry."

So stock up your future with dreams?

"The following realization rivals in its significance to religion; that once the background melody has been discovered one is no longer baffled in one's speech and obscure in one's decisions. There is a carefree security in the simple conviction that one is part of a melody, which means that one occupies a significant space, and has a specific duty toward a vast work where the least counts as much as the greatest."

So the realization of your "life calling"

"What do we amount to as long as we can get up and a wind, a gleam, a song wrought of the voices of a few birds in the air can seize us and do whatever it wants with us? It is no good to hear all of this and to see it and to seize it, not to become numb to it but on the contrary: everything is to be felt in countless ways in all its variations yet without losing ourselves to it."

Never before have I come across this concept- that nature takes control of us and it itself has a "spiritual" impact on us. Outside forces into us. I always thought of the emotions coming out and being part of the whole harmony...Extremely interesting. But why not get lost to it? Do we become too much affected, as the opposite extreme of numb and therefore not enjoying it properly? Maybe we must retain something of ourselves to enjoy it to the fullest extent. Something in us connects to it.

"How peculiar, the way life works. If this were not a bit arrogant one would like to a position oneself outside of it all, on the opposite side of everything that happens just in order not to miss anything at all- even there one would still remain rooted in life's true center, maybe there even more than elsewhere, there where all things come together without a proper name. But ultimately we are also quite attracted and taken in by names, by titles, by the pretexts of life, because the whole is too infinite and we recover from it only by naming it for awhile with the name of one love, no matter how much this passionate delimitation then puts us in the wrong, makes us capable, murders us..."

We do love to pinpoint things, categorize them- a feeling, a concept, to somehow lower it, to make it smaller than the infinite- which it is meant to be...

"We make our way through Everything like thread passing through fabric: giving shape to images we ourselves do not know."

I do like the sewing metaphor :) this again shows the Genius - even we ourselves do not know that we are part of a great masterpiece- and with each decision, each breath taken- we transform it into something even more glorious

"For they still held on to the view that it is possible for us to take something into ourselves, draw it in and swallow it, while in fact we are so filled up from the beginning that not the tiniest thing could be added (...)all things can effect a new alignment within us."

The word "alignment" is very nicely put there- as if we truly are a point in space, in eternity, the infinite.

"(...) just as whatever is yet to occur does not fall from the skies at the last moment but resides always already right next to us, around us and within our heart, waiting for the cue that will summon it to visibility."

Beautiful. Absolutely marvelous idea. Everything has already been planned. Our future lives within us, around us. It is in the air we breathe...our thoughts. It is a destiny that is our companion at all times. Marvelously said, "a cue" by the Great Creator Himself.

Goodness how marvelous- everything, absolutely everything, works towards the same purpose. Everything is calculated for that one goal!

"For this reason he is in the right who encounters everything as something that will not return. It does not matter whether he then forgets or remembers, as long as he had been fully present only for its duration and been the site, the atmosphere, the world for what happened, as long as it happened within him, in his center, whatever is good and what is bad—then he really has nothing else to fear because something else of renewed significance is always about to happen next. The possibility of intensifying things so that they reveal their essence depends so much on our participation. When things sense our avid interest, they pull themselves together without delay and are all that they can be, and in everything new the old is then whole, only different and vastly heightened."

So that's what he means when he says living life to the "fullest". To live according to life's "intensity". To not worry about the fact that it will pass, but recognize the fact and live the moment accordingly.

"God, how many opportunities and examples that invite us to become something—and in response to those, how much sluggishness, distractedness, and half-will on our side."

What contrast! When God's hands mold us, we become "sluggish". I love how he says- that we are invited to become something all the time. So many opportunities pass us by!

"We have to be committed not to miss or neglect any opportunity to suffer, to have an experience, or to be happy; our soul arises refreshed from all of that. It has a resting place at those heights that are difficult to reach, and it is at home where one can advance no further: up there we have to carry it. But as soon as we put it down for dead at those extreme spots it awakens and takes flight into skies and celestial depths that from now on belong to us."

Magical. Goodness that's beautiful. Our soul wants to live in the experience. Oh, to reach those spots!

"But one lives in the density of one's own body, which imposes its particular measure already in purely physical terms (because after all there is nothing to go on but this physical I) and since one lives, I think, in the awkwardness of this body and confined and imprisoned by the surrounding world in which one moves...one is not always as free, as loving, and as innocent as one should be able to be according to one's proper resources and convictions. And frequently insecurity and distractedness limit us further. What bighearted confidence in oneself would be needed to respond to every voice that reaches us with the truest sense of hearing and the most undistracted reply."

This all seems very theoretical- one cannot reply because that is what makes us human.

"But then these two separate lives should remain without any knowledge of the other for a period and exist as far apart and as detached from the other as possible. This is necessary for each life to base itself firmly on its new requirements and circumstances."

"Ah, if I had a manual craft, a daily task, something closer...instead of this waiting for faraway things."

"(...) that the advances of my life could not be brought about by force but occur silently, and that I prepare for them while working quietly and with concentration on things that on a deep level I recognize to be my tasks."

Yes, they will happen eventually. This time is necessary to bring them about...to get to that certain point. For time cannot skip periods in life, it has to plow through them in order to pass them and get to more important parts.

"We play with dark forces that cannot be recaptured with the names we give them, like children playing with fire and it seems for a moment as if energy has rested dormant in all objects until now, until we arrived to apply it to our fleeting life and its requirements. But, again and again through millennia,those fires shake off their names and rise like an oppressed class against their little masters, or not even against them- they simply rise and the various cultures slide off the shoulders of the earth, which is once again great and expansive and alone with its oceans, trees and stars."

"(...) if we were only to recall even a single hour when nature acted beyond us, beyond our hopes, beyond our lives, with that sublime highness and indifference that fill all of its gestures. It knows nothing of us. And whatever human beings might have accomplished, not one has yet reached such greatness that nature shared in his pan or would have joined in his rejoicing."

Exactly, nature does not pay us any attention, because it is way beyond us- it is in a whole nother realm.

"What we experience as Spring God views as a fleeting tiny smile that passes over the earth. The earth seems to be remembering something, and in the summer time she tells everyone about it until she grows wiser during the great autumnal silence with which she confides in those who are alone. Even when taken together, all the springs that you and I have experienced are not enough to fill even one of God's seconds. The spring that God is supposed to notice must not remain in the trees and meadows but somehow has to assume its force within people, for then it takes place, as it were, not in time but in eternity and in God's presence."

Goodness that's beautiful and it is so true and real. This is the essence of believing in God. That this beautiful purity in nature should be within us! Then it will be eternal in our souls.

"But then while other human beings continued to be alien to me, I was drawn to things, and from these things there emanated a joy, a joy in being that always stayed consistently calm and strong and in which there was never any hesitation or doubt...Things, however in their way of patiently enduring and lasting, later offered me a new, greater, and more pious love [compared to his Christan faith] a kind of belief with neither fear nor limit. Life also belonged to this belief. Ah, how I believe in it, in life. Not the life constituted by time but this other life, the life of small things, the life of animals and of the great plains. This life that continues through millennnia with no apparent investment in anything, and yet with all of its fores of movement and growth and warmth in complete harmony."

***
"Whether you are surrounded by the singing of a lamp or the sounds of a storm, by the breathing of the evening or the sighing of the sea, there is a vast melody woven of a thousand voices that never leaves you and only occasionally leaves room for your solo To know when you have to join in, that is the secret of your solitude, just as it is in the art of true human interaction"to let yourself take leave of the lofty words to join in with the one shared melody."

Just as communicating- to know when to join in and not speak- to join solitude. To join it completely. This is a marvelous concept! To become part of the whole.

"The individual who could hear the entire melody would be at once the loneliest and the most common, for he would hear what no one else hears and yet only because he would grasp in its perfect completeness that which others strain to hear obscurely and only in parts."

Marvelous. O goodness to be so completely part of the melody, the perfection of nature... What an honor for a human being! Only the "divine race" has the gift of knowing this loneliness...

"(...)we are truly infinitely alone, each one of us, and unreachable with very rare exceptions. We must learn to live with this fact."

What makes us be so alone?

"I consider the following to be the highest task in the relation between two people: for one to stand guard over the other's solitude. IF the essential nature of both indifference and the crowd consists in the nonrecognition of solitude, then love and friendship exist in order to continually furnish new opportunities for solitude. And only those commonalities are true that rhythmically interrupt deep states of loneliness."

"(...)everything that exists is governed by laws that reign over all beings without relinquishing their force but rather rush to prove and test themselves on every stone and every feather dropped by us."

***
"There is a kind of purity and virginality in this looking away from one's self: it is just as when one is drawing with one's eyes locked on and intertwined with an object in nature, and the hand traces its path somewhere down there all alone, moves and moves, grows timid, wavers, regains confidence, moves and moves deep beneath the face which is like a star above it, which does not look but only shines. It seems as if I had always been creative in this way the face caught in contemplation of distant things, the hands alone. And this is surely how it ought to be. This is the way I would gradually like to become again, but in order to do so I have to remain alone as I am now; my loneliness first has to be firm and secure again like a forest where no one ever set foot and which has no fear of steps. It must lose all emphasis, exceptionality, and obligation. It must become routine, completely natural and quotidian. The thoughts that enter, even the most fleeting ones, must find me all alone; then they will decide to trust me again."

The fact that thoughts are something apart from oneself- like Muse's gracing us with their presence of creativity- that is just marvelous and unique. That they don't come to us at our calling, but we have to wait for them, be at peace, in order so that they slowly come crouching near. As if this spirit of imagination, of the mind, is something that has to trust us, so that we do not abuse it, so that we make them grow.

"It is the realization that even this apparently most in intimately shared thing called love can be fully developed and, as it were, perfected only when one is alone, apart from others. For the confidence of strong inclinations results in a current of pleasure that sweeps us along and finally casts us out somewhere else, while an individual enclosed in his feelings will experience love in every task to be performed on himself and as the incessant creation of bold and magnanimous challenges imposed on the other. People who are this in love with each other summon infinite dangers, but they remain safe from the petty perils that have worn out and eroded so many great beginnings of true emotion. Since they continually wish for and challenge each other to achieve something extreme, neither of them can treat the other unjustly by imposing a limit; on the contrary, they incessantly create for one another and expansiveness and freedom, just as the one who loves God has always from his heart and instituted in the depths of the heavens God's boundlessness and reign. That illustrious beloved has had cautious wisdom and even (it cannot be misunderstood when phrased this way) used the noble rose of never revealing himself. This for a few ecstatic souls the love of God could lead to imaginary moments of pleasure- and yet, according to its essence, it has always remained work through and through, a most demanding chore and a most difficult effort."

Like the comparison.
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Rilke has taught me a lot- about the enjoyment of life, about it's essence. These things I have pondered after I've read them, and they have come up in life, which aroused more questions. Very thought provoking, and extremely unique ideas. The fact that he uses nature as something that could be achieved and completely understood is really marvelous. I do like him, he seems(ed) to be very wise.

--
Pub by Modern Library