Saturday, August 31, 2013


Two individuals who are quiet to the same degree have no need to talk about the melody that defines their hours.  This melody is what they have in common in and of itself.  Like a burning altar it exists between them, and they nourish the sacred flame respectfully with their occasional syllables.

-- Ranier Maria Rilke
(Letters on Life,
translated by Ulrich Baer)

Saturday, August 24, 2013


Music, of course, is still close to us in its essence:  it rushes toward us and we block its path so it passes straight through us.  Music is almost like the air of higher regions:  we breathe it deeply into the lungs of our spirit, and it infuses a more expansive blood into our hidden circulation.  Yet how far music reaches beyond us!  Yet how far it pushes on with no regard for us!  Yet how much of which it carries right through us we still fail to seize!  Alas, we fail to seize it, alas, we lose it.


--Rainer Maria Rilke
(from Letters on Life,
translated by Ulrich Baer)

Saturday, August 17, 2013


Even when music speaks, it still does not speak to us.  The perfectly created work of art concerns us only insofar as it survives us.


--Rainer Maria Rilke
(from Letters on Life,
translated by Ulrich Baer)

Saturday, August 10, 2013


The creations of art always result from a state of having-been-in-danger, from an experience of having-gone-to-the-end, up to the point where no human can go any further. . . .  In this way the art object can be of such tremendous help in the life of the one compelled to create it -- it is his summary:  the knot in the rosary at which his life says a prayer, the ever recurring proof of his unity and truthfulness that is given to no one but himself and whose outward effects appear anonymous, nameless, as nothing but necessity, as reality, as existence.


--Rainer Maria Rilke
(from Letters on Life,
translated by Ulrich Baer)

Saturday, August 3, 2013


But in the painting, the building, the symphony -- in a word, in art itself, they [the artist and nature] seem to join together as if in a higher, prophetic truth, to rely on one another, and it is as if they completed each other to become that perfect unity that characterizes the essence of the work of art.


--Rainer Maria Rilke
(from Letters on Life,
translated by Ulrich Baer)