Rainer Maria Rilke in a letter to Magda von Hattingberg, Peb. 17, 1914
I love in-seeing. Can you imagine with me how glorious it is to in-see a dog, for example, as you pass…to let yourself precisely into the dog’s center, the point from which it begins to be a dog, the place where God, as it were, would have sat down for a moment when the dog was finished, in order to watch it during its first embarrassments and inspirations and to nod that it was good, that nothing was lacking, that it couldn’t have been better made….Though you may laugh, if I tell you where my very greatest feeling, my world-feeling, my earthly bliss was, I must confess to you: it was, again and again, here and there, in such in-seeing — in the indescribably swift, deep, timeless moments of this godlike in-seeing.
transl. by Stephen Mitchell













