« music and poetry | Main | you who are without an equal »
September 6, 2007
a pure spirit with a virgin ear
Ah Malte, we pass away like that, and it seems to me that people are all distracted and preoccupied and don’t really pay attention when we pass away. As if a shooting star fell and no one saw it and no one made a wish. I don’t think there is such thing as fulfillment, but there are wishes that endure, that last a whole lifetime, so that anyhow one couldn’t waif for their fulfillment.
..........
There are no classes in life for beginners; right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult.
..........
It is of course imagination on my part to say now that at that time I already felt something had entered my life which I alone would have to walk around with, forever and ever. I see myself lying in my little bed, unable to sleep, and somehow vaguely foreseeing that life would be like that: full of truly strange experiences that are meant for one person alone and can never be spoken. What is certain is that gradually a sad and heavy pride arose in me. I pictured to myself how a person could walk around full of inner happenings and silent. I felt a passionate sympathy for grownups; I admired them, and made up my mind to tell them that I admired them.
..........
Richest in nearly incomprehensible experiences, though, were the birthdays. You already knew, of course, that life took pleasure in not making distinctions; but on this day you got up with a right to joy that couldn’t be doubted. Probably the feeling that you had such a right had developed in you at a very early age, the age when you grasp at everything and really get everything; when, with the unerring power of the imagination, you take the Things you happen to have and raise them to the primary-color intensity of the desire that just happens to possess you.
But then, all at once, come those strange birthdays when, fully established in the consciousness of this right, you see the others becoming uncertain.
..........
Master, if some pure spirit with a virgin ear were to lie down beside your music: he would die of bliss; or he would become pregnant with infinity, and his fertilized brain would explode with so much birth.
Rilke - The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Posted by amin at September 6, 2007 6:58 PM