Jun 7, 2010

All of it

I bumped into this Rainer Maria Rilke quote while reading Stacy Morrison's memoir of divorce, Falling Apart in One Piece, and I loved it. (This is a translation, obviously, of whatever Rilke wrote in German.) When I say I loved it, I mean that I was reading it while taking a bath (TMI?), and I had to put the book down because I was crying so hard. Sometimes words can just reach out and grab a person!

Have patience with everything 
unresolved in your heart
and to try to love the questions themselves 
as if they were locked rooms or books 
written in a very foreign language. 
Don't search for the answers, 
which could not be given to you now, 
because you would not be able to live them. 
And the point is, to 
live everything.
Live the questions now. 
Perhaps then, someday far in the future, 
you will gradually, without even noticing it, 
live your way into the answer.

8 comments:

Laura said...

Powerful words. Very cool.

And I totally read in the bathtub. That's the only place I get any reading done at all. So if yours is TMI, then so is mine! :)

Sherry said...

Do you think sometimes, "I wish I had written that?"
Definitely wish I had written this quote.

BTW, our Auntie Myrtle refers to reading in the bathtub as baptizing the book, since her experience is that most people fall asleep and drop the book.

Elizabeth said...

living the questions ... a model for all of us.

Becca said...

I don't know how any of you people read in the tub. It makes my fingers feel too dry to even think of it.

But Erin, what beautiful, comforting, bittersweet words! Thanks for sharing this poem.

Tracy Loewer said...

That's a fabulous quote.

Susan said...

Beautiful. Remember our bathboards?

Melea said...

Oh wow. I really love that! It's so... powerful and really applies to so many things. Love it!!

... and I too read in the bathtub pretty much every time I'm in there. :)

Sherry said...

My bathboard had strawberries on it: :)