The Poet's Guide to Life by Rainer Maria Rilke

Author:Rainer Maria Rilke
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780307432490
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

ON NATURE

It Knows Nothing of Us

It is difficult to live in this world because there exists little love between nature and man and between man and god. Man does not need to love either nature or god—but he has to comport himself in relation to him the same way nature does.

We play with dark forces that cannot be captured with the names we give them, like children playing with fire, and it seems for a moment as if all energy had rested dormant in all objects until now, until we arrived to apply it to our fleeting life and its requirements. But, again and again throughout millennia, those forces shake off their names and rise like an oppressed class against their little masters, or not even against them—they simply rise and the various cultures slide off the shoulders of the earth, which is once again great and expansive and alone with its oceans, trees, and stars.

What does it mean that we transform the outermost surface of the earth, that we groom its forests and meadows and extract coal and minerals from its crust, that we receive the fruits from the trees as if they were meant for us, if we were only to recall even a single hour when nature acted beyond us, beyond our hopes, beyond our lives, with that sublime highness and indifference that fill all of its gestures. It knows nothing of us. And whatever human beings might have accomplished, not one has yet reached such greatness that nature shared in his pain or would have joined in his rejoicing. Sometimes nature accompanied great and eternal hours of history with its mighty, roaring music, or the winds seemed to stop when a decision was pending, all nature standing still with bated breath, or it would surround an instant of harmless social happiness with waving blossoms, swaying butterflies and leaping winds—but only in order to turn away the next moment and to abandon the one with whom it had just seemed to share everything.

The final and most profound element of which the great objects of art have been made exists in all of nature; it grows with every field, every skylark knows of it, and nothing else but it forces the trees into full bloom. Yet in nature it is concealed (while in objects of art it is held up in a breathless silence—like a monstrance); it is scattered about and nearly lost (while art objects contain it: gathered, recovered, preserved forever). And the difficult, arduous path of our development, obstructed in hundreds of ways, entails the recognition of greatness, spiritual necessity, and infinity ultimately in those areas where it cannot be captured in a single glance, where it is nearly impossible to seize it altogether except if one toils like Cinderella. Life is severe and unyielding like the step-mothers and evil queens of the fairy tale, but it also harbors those sweet and diligent forces that ultimately will finish the tasks for those who are patient and good but who cannot master them alone.

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