Saturday, July 27, 2013


Poet or painter, musician or architect, all solitary individuals at bottom who turn to nature because they prefer the eternal to the transient, the profound rhythms of eternal laws to that which finds justification in passing.


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

Saturday, July 20, 2013


Fame has to occur quickly in an era when its results are worn thin so rapidly; even the youngest people live among these fame-motors set up around them by a publisher and a few friends.  It is quite rare to encounter a truly creative and productive person who resides in his own stillness or simply in the midst of his melody, close to the honest beating of his heart!


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

Saturday, July 13, 2013


The loneliest people above all contribute most to commonality.  I have said earlier that one person might hear more and another less of the vast melody of life; accordingly, the latter has a smaller or lesser duty in the great orchestra.  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.


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

Saturday, July 6, 2013


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 the art of true human interaction:  to let yourself take leave of the lofty words to join in with the one shared melody.

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