Transcribed Text
Transcribed Text
...perhaps we would endure our sadness with greater confidence than our joys. For they are moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown: our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent.I believe that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension that we find paralysing 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 anymore, --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 other noisy and fortuitous point of time at which it happens to us as if from outside...We will also gradually learn to realize that that which we call destiny goes forth from within people not from without into them....But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigimatical, will live the relation to another or something alive and will himself draw exhaustively from his own existence. For if we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it appears evident that most people learn to know only a corner of their room...Thus they have a certain security, and yet that dangerous insecurity is so much more human which drives the prisoners of Poe's stories to feel out the shape of their horrible dungeons and not to be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their abode. We, however are not prisoners. No traps or snares are set about us, and there is nothing which should intimidate or worry us. We are set down in life as in the element to which we best correspond, and over and above this we have throughout thousands of years of accomodation become so like this life that when we hold still, we are, through a happy mimicry, scarcely to be distinguished from all that surrounds us. We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; Has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our lives according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then it will seem to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and grave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something that wants help from us. Rilke