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Existentialism
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926)
Quotes |
Wait a minute, there's a snag somewhere; something disagreeable.
Why, now, should it be disagreeable?...Ah,I see; it's
life without a break. (Jean Paul Sartre - huis clos)
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I
believe that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension
that we find paralyzing because we no longer hear our surprised
feelings living. Because we are alone with the alien thing
that has entered into our self; because everything intimate
and accustomed is for an instant taken away; because we stand
in the middle of a transition where we cannot remain standing.
For this reason the sadness too passes: the new thing in us,
the added thing, has entered into our heart, has gone into
its inmost chamber and is not even there any more, is already
in our blood. And we do not learn what it was. We could easily
be made to believe that nothing has happened, and yet we have
changed, as a house changes into which a guest has entered.
We cannot say who has come, perhaps we shall never know, but
many signs indicate that the future enters into us in this
way in order to transform itself in us long before it happens.
And this is why it is so important to be lonely and attentive
when one is sad: because the apparently uneventful and stark
moment at which our future sets foot in us is so much closer
to life than that other noisy and fortuitous point of time
at which it happens to us as if from outside. The more still,
more patient and more open we are when we are sad, so much
the deeper and so much the more unswervingly does the new
go into us, so much the better do we make it ours, so much
the more will it be our destiny, and when on some later day
it "happens" (that is, steps forth out of us to
others), we shall feel in our inmost selves akin and near
to it. And that is necessary. It is necessary and toward this
our development will move gradually that nothing strange should
befall us, but only that which has long belonged to us. We
have already had to think so many of our concepts of motion,
we will also gradually learn to realize that that which we
call destiny goes forth from within people, not from without
into them. Only because so many have not absorbed their destinies
and transmuted them within themselves while they were living
in them, have they not recognized what has gone forth out
of them; it was so strange to them that, in their bewildered
fright, they thought it must only just then have entered into
them, for they swear never before to have found anything like
it in themselves. As people were long mistaken about the motion
of the sun, so they are even yet mistaken about the motion
of that which is to come. The future stands firm . . . but
we move in infinite space.
How
should it not be difficult for us?
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...to
childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound
and difficult transformations, to days in quiet restrained
rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas,
to it is still not enough to be able to think of all that.
You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different
from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor,
and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth
and are closing again. But you must also have been beside
the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with
the open windows and the scattered noises. And it is not yet
enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when
they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait
until they return.
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Not
into a beyond whose shadow darkens the earth, but into a whole,
into the whole.
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Des
Sommers Wochen standen still,
es stieg der Bäume Blut;
jetzt fühlst du, daß es fallen will
in den, der alles tut.
Ce
qu'on fait n'est jamais compris mais seulement loué ou blâmé.
Nietzsche, Gay Science |
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