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September 12, 2007
to love is to endure
Isn’t the earth still warm with you, and don’t the birds still leave room for your voice? The dew is different, but the stars are still the stars of your nights. And isn’t the whole world yours? For how often you set it on fire with your love and saw it blaze and burn up and secretly replaced it with another world while everyone slept. You felt in such harmony with God, when every morning you asked him for a new earth, so that all the ones he had made could have their turn. You thought it would be shabby to save them and repair them; you used them up and held out your hands, again and again, for more world. For your love was equal to everything.
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Women who are loved live poorly and in danger. If only they could surpass themselves and become women in love. Around women in love there is sheer security. No one is suspicious of them any more, and they aren’t in a position to betray themselves. In them the mystery has become inviolate; they cry it out whole, like nightingales; it is no longer divided. They lament for one man; but the whole of nature joins in with their voice: it is the lament for an eternal being. They hurl themselves after the man they have lost, but even in their first steps they overtake him, and in front of them there is only God. Theirs is the legend of Byblis, who pursued Caunus as far as Lycia. The urgency of her heart drove her through many lands on his track; until at last she came to the end of her strength; but so powerful was the mobility of her innermost being that, sinking to earth, she reappeared, beyond death, as a fountain, hurrying, as a hurrying fountain.
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How right that poetess had been: when she knew that sexual union means nothing but increased solitude; when she broke through the temporal aim of sex and reached its infinite purpose. When in the darkness of embracing she delved not for fulfillment but for greater longing. When she despised the thought that of two people one had to be the lover and one the beloved.
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To be loved means to be consumed in flames. To love is to give light with inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to pass away; to love is to endure.
Rilke - The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Posted by amin at September 12, 2007 2:58 AM