The same sensitivity that opens artists to Being also makes them vulnerable to the dark powers of non-Being. It is no accident that many creative people--including Dante, Pascal, Goethe, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Beethoven, Rilke, Blake, and Van Gogh--struggled with depression, anxiety, and despair. They paid a heavy price to wrest their gifts from the clutches of non-Being. But this is what true artists do: they make their own frayed lives the cable for the surges of power generated in the creative force fields of Being and non-Being. (Beyond Religion, p. 124)
force accident gifts power art religion depression true sensitivity dark anxiety despair artists creative lives vulnerable being price nietzsche rilke heavy
How they are all about, these gentlemenIn chamberlains' apparel, stocked and laced, Like night around their order's star and gemAnd growing ever darker, stony-faced, And these, their ladies, fragile, wan, but proppedHigh by their bodice, one hand loosely dropped, Small like its collar, on the toy King-Charles: How they surround each one of these who stoppedTo read and contemplate the objects d'art, Of which some pieces still are theirs, not ours. Whit exquisite decorum they allow usA life of whose dimensions we seem sureAnd which they cannot grasp. They were aliveTo bloom, that is be fair; we, to mature, That is to be of darkness and to strive.
poetry maturity introspection rilke
Not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree.
poetry letters rilke
Whoever you are, go out into the evening, leaving your room, of which you know every bit; your house is the last before the infinite, whoever you are.
life infinity experience rilke
Afterward, Isabel drove me home and I shut myself in the study with Rilke, and I read and I wanted. And leaving you (there arent words to untangle it) Your life, fearful and immense and blossoming, So that, sometimes frustrated, and sometimes understanding Your life is sometimes a stone in you, and then, a starI was beginning to undertand poetry.
grace sam rilke
And leaving you (there aren't words to untangle it)Your life, fearful and immense and blossoming, so that, sometimes frustrated, and sometimes understanding, Your life is sometimes a stone in you, and then, a star.
Again and Again, however, we know the language of love, and the little churchyard with its lamenting names and the staggeringly secret abyss in which others find their end: again and again the two of us go out under the ancient trees, make our bed again and again between the flowers, face to face with the skies
Rilke wrote: 'These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased.
nature trees space rilke
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